By Martin Popoff
"Risk was Megadeth going as far out on a limb as far as developing our melodies, as far as we've ever gone. Heavy metal was at a very precarious time when we made Risk. Pretty much all the industry insiders were saying it's dead, it's done, it's over, don't even utter that phrase in your sentences or you'll be killed (laughs). And obviously Megadeth is pretty much a metal band. Fortunately we're metal with a combination of other types of music, so we were able to make a record like Risk and pull it off and in my opinion, do very well with it. After doing that though, when we started writing songs for The World Needs A Hero, we started writing them out on tour, which is where most Megadeth songs develop actually, at least the riffs and concepts. When we started writing those songs, we were in a major transition. We knew we were coming up on our last record for Capitol Records, which was our domestic label at the time. Marty Friedman had just announced that he wanted to leave the band. We had had some outside songwriting influence from one of our managers, Bud Prager, who is listed on a lot of the songwriting credits on Risk, so all of a sudden there was this major disruption going on in our camp, and I think that is what fueled The World Needs A Hero. It was very much a conscious effort to not do anything that anybody from the outside would ever influence us to do. Which for us, in itself was a challenge, because for Risk, Cryptic Writings, and Youthanasia, we wanted to become somewhat pliable to listen to producers and management and people and our record label, people who have had experience in the business to help guide us in our career. We did not want to be that pigheaded that we couldn't be guided (laughs), because that could be the kiss of death too. This record was all about... you know what? Let's go back to doing what we did when we were a brand new band. And there's kind of a shoot from the hip naivete' that gets lost the longer you go on in this business. And I think that is the essence of what we tried to capture with this record."
MEGADETH - Who Do We Think We Are! Page 4