Eden Munro of Vue Weekly recently conducted an interview with MEGADETH mainman Dave Mustaine. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow.

On touring:

"I've been on the road for the last year and it's going great. There's a lot of people out here, and with people come relationships and relationships are hard to maintain, unless you're a complete phony and then you can pretend you like somebody and really hate their guts. But I'm the kind of person, if I don't like you, it's hard for me not to say something."

On the interconnections between the different groups that make up the music community that MEGADETH is a part of:

"We've always tried to be classy, because the relationship we've always had with you — the press — and them — the audience — we've always really recognized that without the three of us we would not exist. I know that there's a lot of [journalists] that like me and a lot that don't. I know that there's a lot that like me but they don't necessarily like my music. I'm cool with all of that — I know that it's a job and I know that it doesn't necessarily mean that you're a good or a bad person because of what you do. I also know that we've got some fans that are great people and we've got some fans that aren't such nice guys. There are some people who are fans of ours that love our music and they use it to do bad stuff with.”

On the 2006 shooting that took place at Dawson College in Montréal, where the shooter had claimed to have been inspired by MEGADETH's "À Tout Le Monde", a 1994 song that Mustaine re-recorded for the band's most recent album, "United Abominations":

"What happened here before up at Dawson, it was terrible. But I made absolutely sure to say when that happened, that song belongs to the beautiful people of Montréal and it wasn't meant for anybody to do anything like that and I refuse to allow that song to be stolen by him ... I think that you have to take ownership of stuff like that and if you let the bad guys win, you're letting the bad guys win."

On his lyrics:

"I've always tried to use intelligent lyrics. I think it's kind of a shame when singers say, 'Fuck,' just for the sake of it. You can tell when guys are pussies and they use a bunch of dirty words in their songs to make them have some kind of cred. In my whole career I think I've said 'Fuck' maybe twice on over a hundred songs ... but then there's other guys you know who call women ‘bitches' and they just glorify all of this stupidity that people make fun of heavy metal about.

"I like writing about things that are important for us as people regardless of what nationality we are. I like writing stuff that's intelligent for us as a race regardless of how old we are or what sex we are. MEGADETH music is something that's provocative and stimulating and it's been that way ever since the beginning. I've always tried to write lyrics that were something that would make you sit back and say, ‘Wow, I wonder what he's talking about,' and then do a little research on it. I've never said vote this way, vote that way, I'm this so you better be that, too."

Read the entire interview at Vue Weekly.