Elliot Levin of the New York Hard Rock Examiner recently conducted an interview with MEGADETH mainman Dave Mustaine. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.New York Hard Rock Examiner: "Kingmaker" has become a favorite song from "Super Collider", and I've seen it going over well at the concerts too. What does it take for a new song to stay in the setlist beyond the album touring cycle, like "She-Wolf" has?Dave: You know, a lot of it seems so scientific, but a lot of it isn't. It's just a matter of how long the set is, how high the song is singing-wise, who we're playing with... The set we did for Gigantour isn't that different from what we did for the IRON MAIDEN tour, but we took out a couple of songs, we took out "A Tout Le Monde" and we took out "Trust", kind of let it rip. I think a lot of people were totally surprised by that setlist for the IRON MAIDEN dates, and so was I. I thought that was a good setlist, but a lot of times you have people saying, "Oh, you gotta play 'A Tout Le Monde'. That's your biggest song. You gotta play 'Trust'. That's your number one hit. You gotta do this, you gotta do that." I ain't gotta do nothing. And listening to the fans, what they like, and listening to what I like. Between the two of us, one of us is going to be right. And I know that when it comes down to playing stuff that makes me feel good, I like playing the heavy stuff.New York Hard Rock Examiner: I know the fans like the heavy stuff too. I don't think anyone comes to a MEGADETH show to hear the pop singles.Dave: Well, that's the whole thing. There was the period there, going back to the "you have to have been there" syndrome, what were the songs that were coming out around the time "Risk" was out? BLUR was big, BUSH was big, SPONGE was big. There weren't really many metal bands out anymore. If you take all those variables and go, "Oh, yeah, music was looking pretty bleak back then." But if you think about the fact that every one of our records have had our songs on it, it's songs that are great, it's songs that are not great, and I think that that's the beauty of when you play music. You're playing music, you're not working at it. You're having fun, you're playing. Don't take yourself so seriously.New York Hard Rock Examiner: "Youthanasia" was my very first MEGADETH record ever, so I'll always have a soft spot for it. Any chance you'll go out and tour the whole album like you did with "Countdown" and "Rust In Peace"?Dave: Very big chance. In fact, funny that you mention that, we were just talking about the part where David Ellefson [bass] used to play the extra floor tom during "Reckoning Day", because the video we did for that song was filmed in Finland and Finland is right next to Russia, so the taxi cab I was in was an old cab from the Russian days back during the cold war. And a lot of the footage from that video, it's a really, really old video, was from all those concerts back in the day when metal was just huge and before the whole alternative new metal things confused things and fucked up our business.Read the entire interview at New York Hard Rock Examiner.
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