Skin O' My Teeth

"Skin o' My Teeth" is the fourth single from American thrash metal band Megadeth's multi-platinum album Countdown to Extinction. The song, written by Dave Mustaine, deals with the theme of a failed suicide attempt, similar to the origin of the phrase skin of my teeth, where the commentator narrowly escapes death. It's one of the fastest songs of the album, with a pace of 196 bpm.

MTV flipped when they saw the lyrics to 'Skin O'My Teeth' because they thought I was promoting committing suicide. It has taken us a long enough time to get our relationship politically correct with MTV. So I don't want to go out and film a video about a song that they are going to look at and say, 'You're nuts.' and if they say, 'Hey Dave, we're going to play your song, as radical as it is, but you have to go on there and say the song is not about suicide,' I'll say it. 'Hey, this song is not about suicide'. —Dave Mustaine, 1992 This is a song about how many times I tried to kill myself and just couldn't get the fucking job done. This is 'Skin O'My Teeth!' —Mustaine, in concert, 1992 That's about people who want to end it and just can't get it together. You know, they cut their wrist; it's just not deep enough. Or they decide to get hit by a car and it just breaks their leg or something. —Mustaine, 1992 This song in no way condones suicide. Life sucks that's why people get fat and lazy; this is Skin O' My Teeth. —Mustaine, 1992 This was a fun video to make. We played live at this raging little club in Chicago called the Metro. The video crew were a bunch of maniacs running around the stage like little rodents. It was hard not to laugh as these crazy guys kept getting in our way. —Marty Friedman, 2002