Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine Explains Why He’s Retiring: ‘I Live Every Day Like It’s My Last’

At the New York book launch for his memoir, In My Darkest Hour, artist was candid with fans about the thrash group’s future

Dave Mustaine physically showed fans the reason why Megadeth are calling it quits during a book launch event for his recently released memoir, In My Darkest Hour, in New York earlier this month. When the moderator, Rolling Stone Senior Writer Kory Grow, asked him if his fans should believe him when he says his band was calling it quits, Mustaine held up his left hand for the audience to see.

“I have an injury to my hand,” he showed the 200-or-so people at New York’s Kaufman Music Center. “Some of you can see it. I’ve got what’s called Dupuytren’s contracture. In the center of my hand, the tendons have grown together and are pulling my finger down. So I have the option at some point to do surgery, and I figured I would do this tour and do the support for this record and at that point, we’ll see what the technology’s like. … I think about, ‘Could I carry on if I just sang?’ I wouldn’t want to do that. I would want to play guitar, because that’s my love.”

In August 2025, Mustaine announced that the long-running thrash group would be retiring sometime after the release of Megadeth. “If there was ever a perfect time to tour the world, it’s now,” he wrote. “This is also a perfect time for us to tell you that it’s our last studio album.” When it came out in January, it debuted at Number One on the Billboard 200. When Grow asked Mustaine at the book launch how that achievement made him feel, Mustaine put his microphone to his crotch and tilted it up, saying, “Boiiiing,” to the audience’s amusement. “It’s a great feeling,” he said. (Mustaine also said at the event that he had no interest in recording a Dave Mustaine solo album, because to him it would just be another Megadeth album.)

Mustaine said that so far Megadeth’s final tour has felt bittersweet. “There’s times when we take the stairs in the back, and walking up the stairs … I say, ‘It’s your stage,’ and I go up there and do my job,” he said. During the chat, Mustaine hinted that recordings from the tour may serve as the basis of a future live album. “If we were to want to, say, have some live recordings of us playing songs for the future, it might be a good idea to record a bunch of different live tracks,” Mustaine said. “But yeah, we’re going to have fun doing it, regardless of whatever we’re going to do.”

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Mustaine also said that Megadeth may still release studio recordings in the future, too. “There’s bits and pieces and little stuff like that,” he said. “There’s a couple completed songs from the last album with James [LoMenzo, bass], Teemu [Mäntysaari, guitar], and Dirk [Verbeuren, drums], that we did not release yet. But I think those are supposed to be bonus tracks for the label or something. … There may be a song or something, but I don’t know.”

He also revealed that another book he had written, detailing the stories behind every song he’d written, was lost in the shuffle of a label that went out of business. “That book was written and turned into Sanctuary Records many, many years ago, and Sanctuary went bankrupt,” Mustaine said. “That was a book called Score, and it was the first 20 years of Megadeth songs. They gave the book back, and I don’t know what happened to it. … I just don’t know if I want to write another book right now.”

When asked what the “Dave Mustaine Retirement Plan” would look like, Mustaine said he’d like to remain involved in music in some fashion — “whether it’s as simple as listening to it or making it,” he said. Mustaine added he hoped for technological developments that would help his hand heal.

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Elsewhere in the hour-long chat, Mustaine discussed his tongue-cancer diagnosis, how he handled it, and what he learned from his battle — all of which serve as the basis for the book, In My Darkest Hour. He explained his mindset about hearing that he had “the Big C” as a doctor rudely told him to the ways that the discipline he’s learned from studying martial arts helped him through it, as well as his general attitude now. “Getting up in the morning is a choice for all of us, and what we’re going to do with that day,” he said. “Especially when you know you’ve got so many days left. It’s important to use those days wisely. For me, I try to live every day like it’s my last, because I don’t know when that will be, and I want to make sure that it’s a good day for everybody around me, my family, my friends.”

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When asked what gives him hope, he simply described his mindset. “I know I just need to keep living life,” he said. “I’ve been living life, trying to do the right thing always because it’s the right thing to do. I look forward to whatever is in store for me, the touring, the playing, the new music if there is any, the moments we get to share doing things like this. … We just like to do cool things. I don’t want to be one of those people that crawls off into a cave and dies. I want to live hard and I want to play hard.”