Dave Mustaine beat cancer and wrote a killer album — with help from his Nashville friends

A path isn't supposed to run from Dave Mustaine's hillside rural estate to a nearby rental where he and his band retreated to cut a new album. 

A few hundred yards of rocky, overgrown field and untamed wooded patches separate his home from the makeshift office. 

He traveled between these houses so many times that on one overcast morning in August, his ATV slipped neatly into a pair of muddy, worn tracks. 

"This is how I used to get to work every day," Mustaine said between light pushes on the gas pedal. "IV on my wrist." 

He wrestled his way to work with an IV bag shadowing him because the 60-year-old spent much of 2019 undertaking chemotherapy for a throat cancer that could've derailed his four-decade career indefinitely.