Dave Mustaine has said that his recognizable voice is often the target of criticism, so much so that he enlisted the help of one of his enemies to alter it.
When the interviewer from Sweetwater asked the Megadeth singer about his “instantly recognizable and identifiable” voice, Mustaine responded by opening up about his throat cancer and the effect it had on his singing.
“Yeah. It works for me, I think. The funny thing is before I got [throat] cancer [in 2019], I was having a lot of problems with my voice. And then cancer came, and I got treatment, and I got healed, and then I had to kind of learn how to sing again, which has been bizarre because it’s like learning how to talk again.”
“I think there’s a lot of things inside here [points to his neck area] that kind of got messed up from the whole process, ’cause they are putting beams of light through you that disintegrate stuff. And I had nine… I think it was nine doses of chemo and 32 doses of radiology. It was a lot — it was a lot. And when I started singing this tour last leg, I wasn’t having a good time singing, but the desire to sing better was there, ’cause I was feeling better about myself.”
“And you’d be surprised when you feel good about yourself how you wanna make that 360-degree feeling. And I’d heard from Kiko [Loureiro, Megadeth guitarist] — he was living with me for a little while during the record ‘Dystopia’ — he had said that as long as you get one percent better every day, it’s only gonna take a hundred days till you’re completely changed and a new you. And I thought, ‘You know, that’s great.'”
“So that’s kind of when I started doubling up on my training and my classes, taking care of myself better and learning a little bit about what’s wrong with my voice. I contacted Tom [Keifer] from Cinderella [who overcame vocal cord paresis], who’s a really nice guy. And we would have been mortal enemies back in the ’80s, right?”
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Watch the full interview with Dave Mustaine here:
