Brann from Mastodon gave me a chance to talk to him the day after Black Sabbath announced their final show ever and I was able to get his immediate public reaction.
‘We got a phone call from management saying that Black Sabbath had reached out and that they along with Tom Morello were hand picking this event to be Ozzy’s last show and trying to get the original members of Black Sabbath together to do one final gig and they wanted us to be a part of it…I was pretty blown away! Those are the forefathers of the genre that we call home…and to be a part of something that will probably be the most historic night in heavy metal history is just beyond, I can’t really wrap my head around it to be honest with you.’
I asked about how it feels to be seen as one of the pillars of heavy metal in the 21st century and he was quite humble saying this about his band.
‘I always thought we were the luckiest band in the world back in 2005 when we got to do the Ozzfest when it was Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden…and just watching those guys on stage and thinking ‘Man this is the greatest of all time’. But never in my wildest dreams did I think that we would be lucky enough to be a part of this…I can’t wait.’
We chatted about our childhoods that were surrounded by the influence of Black Sabbath, how his mom’s cover band used to dress in a Satanic robe while his step father sang War Pigs, how the use of 6/8 time signature truly influenced the way Mastodon makes music.
We moved on to how the song ‘Floods Of Triton’ came to be.
‘When we first get together and start writing for new Mastodon stuff we sort of start with going through archives. Because there’s always these, we call them ‘Homeless Riffs’. There ‘s always a folder full of these, and every time you start a new record we dump those out and see if there’s anything that takes a shine…where you’re like ‘You know this thing, I’ve always liked this riff, I’ve always like the way these parts are strung together’ but we’ve never like honed in on them but there’s always been something about it that I like…sometimes it’s time for a riff…to find it’s home…It was basically like the first two parts back to back…let’s spend a whole day on this and work it up…It was right around the time we all signed off on doing this Lamb of God tour…It’s a tour we talked about for like 10 years…the fact that both of those records came out on the exact same day in the exact same year (2004)…we really should do something to commemorate that, it’s not every day that kind of thing happens…So I reached out to Randy and I was ‘Hey man, we got this song we put together, it’d be awesome if you could get on it.’ The first idea was to put it out before the tour to help promote it, and do something cool with our friends, but do to bureaucracy and red tape, everyone’s favorite stuff to deal with, it didn’t come out until later… BUT it’s just a cool thing for us to have done.’
We chat more on this and he talks about how cool it would be if they could do more collaborations with different bands, but he wants it to be organic in it’s creation. Talking of the album we dive into what they have for the album, Brann says that they have an overabundance of material and also states that they will NOT be doing another double album.
Asking about the theme of the album, which he says will be about a supernatural horror, and that he was influenced by The Exorcist and Hereditary and that those stories would be the ‘darkness that I want to dwell in’.
Mastodon will be on tour with Coheed and Cambria and Periphery and making their first stop ever in Green Bay on June 7th. Here’s to hoping we can get them in the stadium for a tour!
[Spotify: Decker] [YouTube: Mastodon] [Razor Wisconsin] [Concert Calendar]
