On Wednesday, April 8, Megadeth bassist David Ellefson talked to Canada’s The Metal Voice about the progress of the songwriting and recording sessions for the follow-up to 2016’s “Dystopia” album. He said (see video below): “We’ve been working on it, and it’s written, and it’s ready to be recorded. In fact, we were gonna start recording it toward the end of March. But, of course, all of this happened. We ended up having to cancel out of the Hell & Heaven Fest in Mexico City, which I think was March 15th. And right after that, we were gonna go to Nashville and get started cutting tracks, but with everything shutting down like this, we obviously have to put health matters for us… And it isn’t just the four of us — you go in the studio, and now you’ve got a whole staff of people in studios and carting services and all kinds of other services that go along with making records. Everybody’s locked down right now. So once the lockdown lifts and it’s safe to go back to — I hate to say ‘normal life,’ but it’s safe to basically engage in that again, we will absolutely be ready to rock.”
Speaking about the musical direction of the new Megadeth material, Ellefson said: “I think it’s a great record. It’s very heavy. There’s a lot of really fast thrashing stuff. And a lot of it is that the vibe is — it feels very cohesive between the four of us. We worked on a lot of it together, the four of us. Everybody works at home, and we’d throw some ideas into a folder and we’d kind of start working on that. But we spent a lot of time last summer — before we had to shut down for Dave‘s [Mustaine, guitar/vocals] throat cancer treatments — we spent a couple of months together working on it. And that was great, because that adds a whole different angle, a different skew, if you will, to the flavor of the record. That’s how we used to make all the early albums — we’d all live together in Los Angeles and we’d rehearse five, six days a week and then we’d be in the studio together working on it. And over the years, people live in different locations, and, of course, we have a lot of availability of digital technology, so we can kind of send things around to keep collaborating even in downtime like this.
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Grammy Award-winning Megadeth bassist, author, entrepreneur and metal icon David Ellefson, in association with Hexagon Booking, has announced a string of European dates to his “Basstory” tour, a series of limited and exclusive “Storytellers” dates, starting September 21 in Portland, Oregon.