Marty Friedman reveals differences in Megadeth’s music during their career

In a recent interview with Brazil’s Gustavo Maiato, Marty Friedman, who played guitar on the albums “Rust In Peace,” “Countdown To Extinction,” “Youthanasia,” “Hidden Treasures,” “Cryptic Writings,” and “Risk” and was a member of Megadeth from 1990 to 2000, was asked if there was a noticeable difference between the music produced during his Megadeth era and that which came before and after him.

Oh, definitely. In my opinion, completely. Megadeth was a great band before I joined and they were a great band after I left. But my era in Megadeth has its own particular sound and a particular look, and I think it’s very different from all of the other eras. And, yeah, it was very cool.

He also spoke about the band’s magnum opus, “Symphony of Destruction”.

I wrote a lot about this in my autobiography. I have a autobiography called ‘Dreaming Japanese’, and I wrote in great detail about the writing process in Megadeth. And an important thing that I wrote in the book was the fact that no matter whose name was on the song, whose credit, all four bandmembers worked exactly the same amount of time on that writing. They all worked the same amount of time songwriting, starting the song from zero and completing it. And so if I remember, ‘Symphony Of Destruction’ was on the second album that I did with the band, and at that time I was more comfortable in the band because I’d been in the band for almost two years. And it was maybe our first pop song. It was like a pop song, if you could say that. And I was glad because you’ve gotta have pop songs if you wanna reach massive amounts of people. And I think we did it without losing our heavy metal fans, you know what I mean? You can make a pop song, but if you lose your core audience, it’s not something that we wanted to do.