Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine has revealed the track ‘Crush ‘Em,’ from the band’s 1999 album ‘Risk’ as his most hated Megadeth song.
In a recent interview with Noisecreep, Mustaine said the song was a huge mistake: “Probably the dumbest song Megadeth ever did was ‘Crush ‘Em.’ Not that I hate it, because we’ve never released something I didn’t like musically – but I’m not that fond of it.”
He explained that he wrote ‘Crush ‘Em’ to be played during professional ice hockey games instead of the Gary Glitter song ‘Rock And Roll.’ “I’m a season-ticket holder and this is a family sport. I didn’t want that guy’s song – I wanted to write something better,” Mustaine said.
Mustaine admitted the track, which later featured on the soundtrack to ‘Universal Soldier: The Return,’ was intentionally written to have commercial appeal: “So I wrote the riff, then I see the lyrics and I think, ‘This isn’t what I was thinking.’ We’d had huge success with our prior album, big singles and all of that. That had never happened before. So we figures, why not give the label and our management more to work with, since the last one did so well on radio?”
However, he conceded: “That was a huge mistake… it didn’t work.”
Fortunately, Mustaine added that he was proud of the vast majority of Megadeth’s catalog: “I make sure I don’t say something stupid,” he says. “I’ve been pretty fortunate – there haven’t been too many dumb songs in our discography.”
Megadeth recently finished recording their new album ‘Super Collider,’ which will be released via Mustaine’s record label Tradecraft in June.
The band’s latest webisode updating the progress of the album can be viewed below.