On January 23, Megadeth released their highly anticipated final studio album, fittingly titled Megadeth. Among the tracklist is a surprising and historic addition: a brand new cover of Metallica‘s iconic 1984 thrash anthem, “Ride The Lightning“.
Dave Mustaine co-wrote the original track alongside James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, and Cliff Burton before being dismissed from Metallica in 1983. Now, decades later, the frontman has finally laid down his own studio version of the legendary song with his current lineup.
During a recent interview with Jimmy Kay of “The Metal Voice,” Megadeth guitarist Teemu Mäntysaari opened up about his initial reaction to the ambitious idea and the process of bringing it to life in the studio.
While past iterations of Megadeth reportedly pushed back against covering the track, Mäntysaari explained that the current lineup eagerly embraced the opportunity to honor both the genre’s history and their frontman’s songwriting legacy.
“I’ve been asked a lot about this, like you can imagine… Well, I think it was only after we had recorded the [Megadeth] album that I actually saw those interviews [with former Megadeth bassist David Ellefson] and headlines that Dave had been talking about this before with the previous formations of the band and they somehow didn’t wanna do it. But I don’t think I knew this before when we went into this process. But when Dave told us about the idea, we were definitely all in and wanted to do it and thought that it’s a great idea to kind of pay homage to Metallica, of course, but on the other hand also celebrate Dave‘s part in writing these classic songs with Metallica,” he said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
The guitarist also shed light on how the band approached the arrangement. Rather than completely reinventing the wheel, the goal was to inject a modern Megadeth edge while preserving the rawness of the original 1984 recording.
“I knew the song beforehand — I had played it before — and it was really interesting to get Dave‘s little insights to how he thought about those riffs when he was writing them back in the day. And we could try to make it a little bit more like modern Megadeth-sounding version of this song — that’s what we aimed at — and still keeping all the rawness and all the vibe of the original, pretty much. We tried changing few things here and there, but we didn’t wanna stray too far from the original version. We tried — at one point the solo section we extended a little bit more and then we let it be for a couple days and then we listened back and then we were, like, ‘Ah, this somehow sounds wrong’ because you know the song so well already. So then we went back to the original arrangement pretty much, but we made it a little bit faster. We modified little things here and there, like some drum fills, a little bit of the solos we, of course, made out in our own touch. And, yeah, I love how it came out, and it seems like the fans really like it too. So I’m happy we did it.”
Regarding guitar solos—which were famously recorded by Kirk Hammett on the original Ride The Lightning album—Mäntysaari noted that while the main melodies remain intact, playing styles of both him and Mustaine naturally altered the final result.
“Yeah. The bigger lines are pretty much — the ideas of the original, which, I guess, some of those are also original Dave ideas and some are original Kirk ideas or — I don’t know — James [Hetfield and] Lars [Ulrich] ideas. But, yeah, we wanted to keep the main melodies, but, of course, if you really go into the note level, you’ll realize that there’s some things that are slightly different. Like the tapping part that I start with, I tap it slightly differently than Kirk does. And when then Dave comes in, he plays some of the licks between the slower parts, the faster parts he plays a little bit with his own fingering and own touch, of course. So it’s not copied exactly note for note.”
Mustaine has also been vocal about his motivations for finally recording the track. In a recent interview with Guitar World, he explained that revisiting the song allowed him to properly close the loop on his early career while showing respect to his former bandmates.
“The main reason I chose to do this was to close the circle and pay my respects to my partners. I thought this was a really great way to do that. Whenever we select any other band’s music to go on our albums, sometimes there’s a lot of thought behind it and sometimes there’s not. This was one of the ones that we thought long and hard about, because all I wanted to do was play the song I wrote with the guys in Metallica.”
“I wanted to pay my respects to James Hetfield, who I think is an amazing guitar player, and Lars Ulrich, who was an excellent songwriter. I remember when I was there and we were putting these songs together, Lars didn’t just sit there; he was very instrumental in making these songs. Of course, when we got into making demos of these songs, it was fun to do the recordings, but we were never really able to do a full-on produced version of ‘Ride The Lightning‘ [while I was in Metallica], and I would have loved to have heard that. I gotta tell you — listening back to James‘s original vocal performance, it was really tremendous.”
He concluded by clarifying that there was no hidden agenda behind the cover, simply an admiration for a historic piece of heavy metal music.
“Anyway, there’s no big strategy; I have respect for the guys, and I just wanted to show that. And it’s a hell of a song.”
