Guitarist CHRIS POLAND Talks About His Work On The New MEGADETH Album

June 7, 2004

Former MEGADETH guitarist Chris Poland spoke with Christopher Steffen of the Dallas Music Guide about his taste for progressive music and his recent work with ex-bandmate Dave Mustaine on reworking MEGADETH's catalogue and making a new record. What follows are some of the highlights of that interview:

Dallas Music Guide: You've been working with Dave on reworking the old stuff, as well as the new record.

Chris Poland: Dave had remixed "Peace Sells…" and the rest of the catalogue, and he gave me a call one day and asked me to come down and do solos on top of his new record, which is either going to be a MEGADETH record or a Dave Mustaine solo record, I'm not sure. Vinnie Colaiuta was the drummer, and that really piqued my interest, because Vinnie — I've been a longtime Vinnie Colaiuta fan. When I got there, I was really impressed with the majority of the new music, I really really liked it, and I had a lot of fun doing it.

Dallas Music Guide: Would you ever go back to a situation like that?

Chris Poland: No. What I'm doing right now — this kind of music is what I love to do. I do something else so that I can play this music, because I don’t make a lot of money doing this. But it's what I love to do, and I'm not going to do something I don't like to do, that would make me crazy.

Dallas Music Guide: So back in the day, did it make you crazy a bit?

Chris Poland: Oh, no. I don't want you to get me wrong on that. The reason why we liked MEGADETH was that it was physically challenging to play it, and the music was hard to play, also. Physically running around and doing a whole MEGADETH show is really draining, but also musically, it was cutting-edge and progressive, as far as I was concerned. So as long as it was progressive, it was cool with me. And I had [drummer] Gar [Samuelson] in the band — all my learning years were with Gar, so it was really easy to learn that music with him and make it ours. So not for a second, don’t think that I didn’t have fun or that I didn’t enjoy it. This is what I'm pursuing now, and this is all I really want to do. So for me to join MEGADETH would really confuse everybody.

Dallas Music Guide: There's a lot of talk going on and a lot of anticipation for the new MEGADETH record. From the one song that’s been released so far, "Kick the Chair", people are assuming it’s going to be a "Rust in Peace"-type record.

Chris Poland: It's weird, it's like "Rust in Peace" meets "Peace Sells", with a little bit of the first record here and there. Some of the stuff you actually need a slide rule to listen to – there are some songs that are going to take four times [to sink in]. The guitar is really complicated — I can't even remember what I played, I did like ten solos for each song. They kind of dropped it all into Pro Tools and just said, "Yeah, we'll make something out of it." Who knows what it’s going to sound like, I don't know.

Read Chris Poland's entire interview with the Dallas Music Guide at this location.

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