In the mid-to-late ‘90s, hard rock and heavy metal wasn’t at a high point commercially in America, and many bands in the genres tried their hand at softening their sound or changing it entirely. Metallica had “Load” and “Re-Load”; Motley Crue put out “Generation Swine”; and even Rob Halford and Bruce Dickinson quit Judas Priest and Iron Maiden respectively and then put out albums that sounded far removed from their heavy heydays.
Megadeth followed a similar trend in 1999 with their album “Risk.” The record’s songs were decent enough, but they were much more commercial and pop rock sounding than anything the band had released prior. The band even loaned one of the tunes, “Crush ‘Em,” to then-WCW star Goldberg for his entrance music for a brief time.
In a recent interview with Overdrive.ie, former Megadeth bassist David Ellefson talked about the record as it crossed its 25th anniversary.
“I think with ‘Risk’, with Megadeth, we wrote that record mostly at rehearsal, then we went to Nashville and finished it in the studio and it didn’t have time to simmer and percolate and really kind of sink into us,” he said. “Here’s what I found: if you’re not a fan of your music first, it’s hard to convince someone else to be,” he explained. “And that album just didn’t — and now I listen back to it, and it still remains one of the great Megadeth records, even though it doesn’t sound like a Megadeth record of the past, leading up to that point. But we didn’t have enough time to let it just kind of absorb into us. And then next thing you know, we’re right on the road playing these songs and it’s, like, ‘Oh, sh*t. These songs aren’t really connecting so much.’”
He continued: “Here’s the long and the short of it: our manager at the time was really leaning on us to dig deeper into this radio approach, an approach that worked very well on ‘Cryptic Writings’, because we said, ‘Hey, let’s make a third of the record… We’ve gotta reinvent the band in a way that’s competitive with what’s happening around us.’ There’s a radio format here in America called Active Rock radio, and now bands like Disturbed, Shinedown, Godsmack, they own that, Halestorm, they own that format. And we had some success with it, with ‘Symphony Of Destruction’ and ‘Sweating Bullets’ and stuff like that in the early ’90s. And then with ‘Cryptic’, a third of the songs were radio, a third metal, a third kind of whatever, and it worked. It was the right approach. With ‘Risk’, there was just kind of this really heavy push, ‘If some is good, more must be better.’ And our attitude as well, ‘When we get down to Nashville to make the album, we’ll crush out these metal tunes. That’ll be easy. No problem.’ And the truth of it is it took so much time crafting the other songs for the record that we didn’t really have the time or the mindset to make those metal songs that the record should have had to sort of balance it out. So it tended it to be a record that was skewed more as a crafted radio album.”
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