Culture
Brann Dailor reflects on Mega-Monsters Tour, ‘Hushed and Grim,’ and Mastodon’s evolution
By: Nicholas Kobe
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NEWPORT, Kentucky (WOUB) – Mastodon joins forces with Gojira and Lorna Shore to kick off the second leg of their Mega-Monsters Tour at the MegaCorp Pavilion (101 West 4th Street) in Newport tomorrow. Thursday the Mega-Monsters Tour hits Jacob’s Pavilion (2014 Sycamore Street) in Cleveland.
WOUB’s Nicholas Kobe spoke to Mastodon drummer and singer Brann Dailor ahead of those dates.
Listen to the conversation in the SoundCloud link embedded above, and read a transcript of it edited for clarity and length, below.
So if you had to describe Mastodon to somebody in one sentence, what would you say?
Brann Dailor:
We’re super bad ass – and you should buy all of our albums.
Nicholas Kobe:
As soon as you’re done reading, just immediately, whole discography?
Brann Dailor:
Whole discography, and you don’t even have to buy it because you probably have Spotify or another streaming platform and it’s a win-win. You can just go ahead and look up Mastodon – there’s only one of them – and start there.
Nicholas Kobe:
That’s a pretty blunt way to put it. I like it. Right now you guys are touring with Gojira on the Mega Monsters Tour. How do you guys feel, after completing the first leg of that tour and touring with Gojira and Lorna Shore?
Brann Dailor:
I feel good. I guess the two sort of exceeded my expectations, and a lot of people came out, it seemed like everybody was having a good time. We played our songs and Gojira is a really awesome band and we’ve been friends with those guys for a long time. And so it’s always fun to hang out with your friends on tour. They’re really amazing. So I feel like the crowd gets their money’s worth.I think that there’s lots of bands out there touring right now. It’s a very oversaturated market of bands. Everybody’s trying, still trying to come back from the pandemic and the only way that artists can make any kind of money for themselves, and support themselves is through playing live shows.
That’s even really hard these days to make any money out on tour. The avenues for supporting yourself and having a job are getting slimmer. So, it’s important that you give it all you got out there on tour and put on a really fantastic show because otherwise, there’s lots of other competition in town. So I feel like the Gojira and Lorna Shore tour package is worth the money. It’s a really awesome concert experience with lots of all the bells and whistles that you would need for any kind of concert. Plus music. There’s music as well as fire and video and lasers and, and streamers and confetti, and people yelling and, you know, and all the notes get played every single note on a guitar, every single drum gets hit. It’s fantastic.
How’d you guys come up with some of the visual elements during each of your songs for the tour?
Brann Dailor:
Well, it’s basically there’s a number of artists that we’ve worked with in the past. So, my friend Skinner, who’s from Sacramento, who did the album cover for Once from Around the Sun, got together with a production company called Hey Beautiful Jerk, they put together a lot of the visual stuff and basically I just went back and forth with Skinner with concepts and things and pulled a lot from the lyrics. Usually that’s how you do it. You just kind of need, you sort of, pick a visual artist that you like and they will put together some concepts and show you, and you go, “yeah, that looks cool,” or it matches the vibe of the song or, you know, whatever you want to do. So, that’s pretty much how that goes.
Nicholas Kobe:
Obviously you guys have been around for a really long time. Is there any part of the milestone discography you feel is particularly underrated?
Brann Dailor:
I’d say The Hunter album, people kind of poo-pooed it because it came after Crack the Sky, which is such a grand, heavily decorated album and a lot of people’s favorite. So it’s hard to follow something like that where people really fell in love with that record. We had just played that album for a couple years straight on tour, so we sort of flipped it, for ourselves. And I think a lot of the fans were disappointed we didn’t go as in depth musically or kind of having a little bit more fun with it. But I think that that’s pretty experimental, you know? And I think that within the metal landscape, I think it’s a pretty interesting piece of music. So, I would say that one, I would say years later, I’ve seen, you know, people giving it another chance now and being like, ‘oh, I might’ve been wrong about this.’ I think that initial reaction was just because it wasn’t exactly like Crack the Sky. A lot of people, myself included, sometimes want a band’s next record to sound exactly like the last one I fell in love with. And if it isn’t, then it’s, ‘eh.’ Then years later you can rediscover something and go, ‘oh, I missed it!’ So I’d say The Hunter would be the one that gets a bad rap.
Nicholas Kobe:
As a performer, how do you think your drumming and your singing have kind of affected each other by you having to do both at the same time?
Brann Dailor:
I would say that I’m a pretty skilled drummer. If I’m just playing the drums or just singing, I can do either pretty well. Then doing both, I think that it diminishes both things. I can obviously just play the drums, keep the beats too, and I do some fills and stuff, and I probably do a little bit more than some singing drummers are able to pull off, but still not on the same level of playing that I can play when I’m not singing. Vocally, it’s difficult to try to sing through all your arms, all your limbs kind of flailing about. So, I’d say it’d be a lot easier to sing if I wasn’t doing that. So I guess I’m not as good at both things when they’re happening at the same time.
Nicholas Kobe:
Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of a full body workout.
Brann Dailor:
Yeah. Next time you’re on an elliptical start singing, see how, how it feels, you know?
Yeah, so your guys’ latest studio record, Hushed and Grim came out. It was your guys’ first double album. What was the thought process behind doing that long of a project?
Brann Dailor:
Well, it was knee deep in the pandemic, and there wasn’t much opportunity to stop going, you know? We just kept writing and writing and we got too lazy to stop writing music, so we just kept going and we had a lot of material that we really liked and we really enjoyed. So we were like, ‘Hey, listen, if there was a band that anybody would be expecting a double album from, at some point in their career, it might be us. So we have the material, let’s do it.’ It might’ve been a good idea. It might’ve been a bad idea. Time will tell, I guess. For me, for all of us, we really loved it. We didn’t want to whittle it down to an hour’s worth of material and get rid of six to seven songs. Then what do we do with these songs? Wait a year, wait two years, put it out as an EP or something? We just said, listen, they all kind of fit together. Let’s put that together.
Nicholas Kobe:
Yep. When that album came out and I read that it was your first double album I was kind of surprised. So I think you’re right that it was something people kind of expected at some point. Now that that album is, you know, in the rear view mirror there anything that you guys think you particularly learned from that album, that you’re gonna use going forward?
Brann Dailor:
Well, we take something that we dig that we found out about ourselves, musically, from every album we make. We are kind of a big snowball just rolling and picking something up that we always hold in. You’ll always recognize something from the current album that came from the last one, like any kind of evolution. So there’s something in there like, ‘oh, reminds me of something on Hushed and Grim.’ I don’t know what that is yet. We definitely learned that we can make a full length studio album at our own studio, and we don’t have to go anywhere.
Nicholas Kobe:
That’s gotta be a pretty good, freeing feeling to not have to book studio time elsewhere. What was the process like to bring that studio together?
Brann Dailor:
So we own a building as a band, and people rent practice spaces from us. There was a bottom level, and we made those all into rehearsal rooms, and then we took the very back of it and then turned it into a studio. So, it was like construction and making sure the live room was correct. It’s always gonna be, a work in progress, always getting new gear for the studio, and always,building, baffling and trying to improve the different elements that make a live room sound really good. There’s definitely always a little bit of magic to that room. Maybe on paper it shouldn’t sound as good as it does, but it sounds really great.
Nicholas Kobe:
Awesome. The last question I have here for you: what do you think the future looks like for Mastodon?
Brann Dailor:
Well, we have a lot of touring at this point. We start Wednesday in Newport, and then we do the Headbanger’s Boat Lamb of God at the end of October and then November we’re gonna tour and then it’s gonna be Christmas time. I don’t know when we’re gonna start writing – but it’s time to start writing and time to start gathering ideas together for whatever the next Mastodon album is gonna be. I like to just sort of leave it open. When you put preconceived notions on what you want something to sound like, you end up limiting it. Every album that you put out is gonna be sort of a watermark emotionally. We’ve had a run of albums where unfortunately we lost some people that were really close to us. So, fingers crossed, no one’s gonna kick the bucket that’s an integral part of our lives in the next year. And we can get one out that’s not as emotionally doom and gloom, you know?
Nicholas Kobe:
That would certainly be ideal.
Brann Dailor:
Yeah. That’d be sweet.