MASTODON Drummer Talks About Touring With SLAYER, Band's Songwriting Process

David Pehling of KTVU.com recently conducted an interview with MASTODON drummer Brann Dailor. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

KTVU.com: MASTODON has played with SLAYER in the past. Does playing with them still force you to elevate your game onstage?

Brann Dailor: The first SLAYER tour we did was with them and SLIPKNOT in Europe. They kind of threw us in the fire a little bit, because it was our first time ever playing in arenas. So we went from these kind of small club shows to these 10,000- or 15,000-seat arenas that were totally packed. It was crazy. It was our opportunity to sort of step it up and prove that we were there for a reason and not cower in the presence of SLAYER. And I felt like we went through a huge metamorphosis during that tour. We kind of became a professional band, so to speak. We really had to step up our game as far as playing with SLAYER and the big boys, trying to do it as good as they do it, which is pretty difficult because they're … they're SLAYER. But I felt like we held our own, you know? I don't feel like we were a disappointment to the audience that was there to see SLAYER.

KTVU.com: If anything, the Unholy Alliance lineup made me feel bad for LAMB OF GOD, who were playing after you guys and before SLAYER, which has to be tough.

Brann Dailor: It's a tough spot, but they held their own as well. They had a lot of fans in the venues that were there for them, you know what I mean? They're a pretty popular band and they bring the noise. It felt playing with SLAYER. There's a definite feeling of achievement, because we've all been big fans of SLAYER for a long time. It's nice to share the stage with them and maintain those friendships. It's pretty wild. If you told me when I was a 14-year-old kid that I would be swimming in Kerry King's pool twenty years later, I definitely would have called B.S. on you…

KTVU.com: As far as the concept of "Blood Mountain" goes, it's a real departure from your standard metal fare. A lot of bands flirting with progressive rock and more challenging, concept-driven types of music usually let people interpret their albums however they interpret them. For this album, it seems you guys have really gone out of your way to say "This is what this is about." I was wondering if there was a reason that drove you to lay things out so specifically.

Brann Dailor: That's really not for anybody else but us. The concept is for us to get motivated. I mean, writing an album is a task. It's fun, but it's a little bit stressful; it's not like you can be leisurely about it. With us, we get the concept first. This had really only been tested one time for us with "Leviathan". When we got the concept, I think that we found it was a lot easier for us to concentrate on that; to have something tangible we can hold on to and look at. The amount of subject matter we could write about was pretty vast we felt with "Moby Dick". The same thing happened with "Blood Mountain", but even more so, because we thought "We're inventing this; we can do anything we want. We can have it be about anything we want." And having the story play out on this mountain is everything that is MASTODON, for us. It's how we view ourselves as a band. The kind of subject matter that we're able to talk about with "Blood Mountain", with the treacherous journey up the side of the mountain and all the different things that can happen and all the metaphorical meanings of the lyrics opened up endless possibilities going into it. We all felt like that motivated us to finally sit down and start writing for the record. It [the theme] sometimes dictates how the record is going to sound because I think we write more cinematically. When we’re writing songs or riffs, we kind of see it in our heads and what it would look like. So when we have that theme, we use it and it kind of shapes how the music sounds. Some of the song titles, like "The Wolf Is Loose", are things we've had rolling around for a few years now, but never had a song that matched what that sounded like. For us, that song sounded like that title, or like "Sleeping Giant" sounds like "Sleeping Giant" to us. It fits the song perfectly.

Read the entire interview at KTVU.com.