Mastodon

By Davey Jones

Atlanta’s kings of sludge metal, Mastodon have returned from outer space with their new opus of audio psychedelia, the very woody The Hunter. Blunt’s Davey Jones dons his lumberjack gear for a chat with drummer Brann Dailor.

If you were to examine the back catalogue of America’s unlikely metal heroes, Mastodon, you’d discover a band that is in no way scared to have a crack at a concept record – an idea commonly associated with bloated rock acts in their twilight years making an absolute mess of themselves, with or without nappies. That Mastodon have tried, and succeeded, this risky pursuit with stunning results so many times while simultaneously elevating themselves to the throne room of rock’n’roll royalty (multiple album of the year and Grammy nods, thank you very much) should amount to eccentric band members sporting Jared Leto type egos. It’s even more surprising when it turns out drum legend Brann Dailor is just… a dude.

Mastodon’s previous albums have all toyed with their individual themes – Remission with fire, Leviathan with Moby Dick and water, Blood Mountain had earth then Crack The Skye was astral projection, paraplegics and Rasputin. What’s the concept of The Hunter?

To be honest, it’s not much of a theme but wood would be the thing that unifies all of the record. The album cover is made out of wood; it’s been whittled out of wood, so yeah; wood it is. I mean, we did have an idea for something bigger but it didn’t feel quite right.

The Hunter seems far less progressive and more stripped back than Crack The Skye. Is that a fair appraisal?
Yeah, totally. You know, I think Crack The Skye went so far in the progressive direction that we sort of… I don’t know if we got tired of it, but we just wanted to do something a little less complex and a lot more fun.

What brought that change on? Blunt assumes a ten-minute song is pretty difficult to play live.

It’s not hard to play live, you’ve got to concentrate a great deal, which is kind of fun in its own right. When you begin making a record, you kind of have to say to yourself, “What kind of record do you want to make? What has been coming out [musically] and what’s everyone kind of grooving on?” It just happened to be a little simpler and a lot more straight forward, just stripped down and more instinctive I guess. We have, like, three or four parts put together, and they work and we just say, “Okay, that one’s pretty much done, I don’t know what you’re going to do to that one unless you want to really work out a big, huge middle part that’s got all these time changes and weird stuff going on, or we can just leave it the song that it is.” For a lot of the songs we just decided to leave them as is, and just move onto the next one. I think that’s how the record ended up being about 14 songs [long by Mastodon standards].

With Mastodon’s reputation for complex compositions and themes, was it a challenge to make things so much more straight forward and simple?

No, it wasn’t a challenge to make anything simpler, it was more of a challenge to get all the members of the band in the same room to work on it in the studio. There was a lot of stuff going on during the writing process, so it was difficult – frustrating and difficult. Once we finally got in there, we just started hammering it out and it all came pretty quick.

In a previous interview, one band member said, “Making The Hunter was one of the most fun things we’ve done.” What fun were Mastodon getting up to while making this record?

I don’t know who said that, but I feel like we had the same amount of fun that we normally have. I mean really, it was just fast. I wasn’t really having that much fun to be honest, I was having some fun, but it was stressful. When I got done with my drum tracks, that was the easy part, then I had to write lyrics for 13 songs, so I was up all night biting fingernails constantly with this big weight on my shoulders. It was a lot of work to do and it’s hard to find time in the day to do it all. I don’t know, maybe somebody else was having a blast.

With the evolution of the band, it seems vocal melodies are now a more important part of Mastodon. For example, “Curl Of The Burl” is a rock’n’roll singalong. How has this developed as you progress as a band?

Yeah, I think so, I mean we’re actually trying to sing and trying to focus on vocal melodies. We still haven’t gotten to the point where we come up with all the vocal hooks first and then write music underneath it, I don’t know that that’ll ever happen. But yeah, instead of just kind of screaming over something, we actually try to find a cool, vocal melody to go over the top of it. Sometimes it takes time to find
those things.

How did Scott Kelly of Neurosis get involved in The Hunter?

We’ve only got one guest vocal, like the last record, just one guest. We recorded the record really fast, really quick, everything just kind of happened, and we didn’t really have much time to call people and be like, “Hey man, you wanna sing on something?” But we’re always up for doing that if we have time or if it makes sense or you kinda just do the song and you can hear somebody’s voice over the top, you get in touch with them and see if they wanna do it if they’re not busy.

You’ve mentioned how fast the recording process was, but how quick was quick? We imagine you guys would take a fair bit of time in the studio.

We didn’t know what we we’re doing. A week and a half before we went into the studio, we didn’t even know if we were gonna go in. We were very unsure. We had a European tour starting June 1st, it was the end of April and we didn’t know if it was going to happen, so we just decided to go for it.

So The Hunter’s like an unexpected surprise of a child that you didn’t know was about to pop out?

Pretty much. It’s like when you watch those women that have to go to the bathroom, and they think they have to take a big shit and then it turns out to be a baby. It’s pretty much like that. “I didn’t know I was pregnant!”

Can you tell Blunt what working with Mike Elizondo was like? His resume reads like a who’s who of West Coast hip hop.

Mike was awesome, he was just a really mild mannered cool guy and has excellent taste in music [laughs]. He’s a very musical guy, he likes metal and, you know, when he was in his 20s he hooked up with Dr Dre. Of course you’re gonna do that, if Dr Dre wants you to come work with him, I mean that’s gonna be a hell of an experience. Just to have the opportunity to work with massive acts, whether they be hip hop, or pop or singer/songwriter or like Alanis Morissette or whoever, when you get those opportunities, I mean, “No, I just wanna work with metal bands,” would be a stupid response. There’s not too many metal bands that work on a huge scale [like those pop and rap acts], but he loves metal and he loves rock, it’s just not as easy to make any kind of money to support a family when you’re producing metal albums for a living.

How did his name come up? The band didn’t want to go back to Brendan O’Brien or Matt Bayles?

No, we did the Brendan O’Brien thing with Crack The Skye. He was awesome for that record, but we have some heavier stuff that we wanted to do and we didn’t know if Brendan would be into that or not. Basically we went with Mike because he was the first one to come at us and be like, “Hey man, I really want to work with you guys, I’m really a big fan and have been a fan for a long time, and I want to do a record with you guys.”

How did the relationship between Mastodon and Adult Swim come about? [Adult Swim is a satirical cartoon company responsible for Harvey Birdman, Metalocaplypse and Aqua Teen Hunger Force.]

Adult Swim is here in Atlanta, and we’ve done a number of things with them people over the years. We did the theme song for the Aqua Teen movie [“Cut You Up With A Linoleum Knife” from Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters in case you were wondering] a while back. They were putting out a single every week throughout the summer, and they just wanted to know if we had a song. We don’t have any leftover songs, but we recorded “Deathbound” during the Crack The Skye sessions, and it came out really good, but it just didn’t have any place on the record. Crack The Skye was a big, wide-open, more affable sounding record, and if you put “Deathbound” on there, it just would’ve been kind of shoehorning it in. They made that crazy clip for it, a puppet world being destroyed, total armageddon. It rules.