In a recent interview on the Metal Voice, Marty Friedman confirmed he has no plans to reunite with Megadeth.
“I’ve never been approached for any ex-Megadeth stuff because I think everybody… It’s widely known that I’m completely not interested in doing that,” the guitarist said when asked if he had been contacted about Kings of Thrash or collaborating with David Ellefson.
He added, “[I] left an absolutely spotless history that I’m very proud of. Revisited it twice with Megadeth at Budokan and Wacken and it’s absolutely way back there in the past.”
Friedman, who joined Megadeth in 1990, played on five of their albums before leaving in 1999. In 2023, he reunited with the band during performances at Tokyo’s Nippon Budokan and the Wacken Open Air festival.
In a 2024 interview with THAT Rocks!, Friedman shared that he prefers not to be linked to Megadeth anymore. “Once I left Megadeth, the tag ‘ex-Megadeth’ was stuck to my name, and I understood that for about a year or two. And then I really, really wanted to cut that out because I was no longer in Megadeth and I was doing my own thing doing other things not related to Megadeth at all.”
He elaborated, “So from about 2002 or 2003, I just made it a strict rule that any kind of media when they published whatever they were doing, no ‘ex-Megadeth’ next to my name. Just don’t put it in the headline. Don’t put my name with Megadeth— ‘former Megadeth,’ all of that stuff was like a very, very strict rule.”
In his memoir, ‘Dreaming Japanese,’ Friedman recounted the challenges of his final days with the band. Before his last performance, he experienced a severe panic attack that sent him to the ER. Despite his condition, he managed to take the stage and perform as though nothing was wrong.
