Mastodon: "All I ever wanted was for someone to tell me this album helped"

We bring an emotional darkness for people. If they want to be in that safe place, they can be." Finding time before rehearsal for his set on The Late Sh...

We bring an emotional darkness for people. If they want to be in that safe place, they can be." Finding time before rehearsal for his set on The Late Show with Seth Meyers, Mastodon drummer and co-vocalist extraordinaire Brann Dailor delves deep into the psyche of the band and their fans. Mastodon's latest studio release, ‘Emperor of Sand' is once again a conceptualised epic tale that uses storytelling to resonate - though getting to this point is a surprisingly relaxed process, he explains. "We're never quite sure what it's going to sound like, there are never any pre-determined notions when it comes to anything Mastodon, and that's what makes us organic." 'Emperor of Sand' is a project fuelled by the band's personal lives, and as the recording sessions progressed, their tales were used to flesh out the album's narrative. "Over a few months, we put together a basic outline of what the story should be and then tried to tie it all into what everybody was experiencing - life, cancer. Bill [Kelliher guitar]'s mother was going through brain cancer, and it seemed to work metaphorically, but it had to be a representation."

"I want it to be someone's everything, because it is for me."

Exposing such tender parts of your life isn't easy. "It takes a little bit of extra work, but for me, it pays off emotionally. I just want to feel like I gave it everything I have and that I took all the measures to make sure that it's special and honest and truthful and interesting. Well, interesting to me at least - but I'm not that skilled of a writer." It's a statement loaded with modesty; if you've ever found yourself reading the lyrics to a Mastodon song, you'll know they're not run-of-the-mill. "I don't consider myself a writer or anything," Brann laughs. "I do my best with the lyrics and try to make them the least amount of embarrassing possible. I try to get them so my wife can read them without singing, and have me and her not laugh." "It was a difficult period to go through," he muses, "but what do you do? Do you side step it, knowing the emotions coming out of the album musically are steeped in all the personal things that were going on? Lyrically think this song is about baloney sandwiches so that you don't have to talk about what the emotionality connected to the actual music is? Or do you just confront it?" Brann recalls one of his first experiences in dealing with delving into his personal life. "For people who found out after [2009 album] 'Crack The Skye' came out, with me talking about it, 'Hey, this is about my sister, she killed herself' - that's the last thing I want to talk about on a daily basis. I spent years being like, 'I don't wanna talk about that', but on the flip-side, we had all these people connecting with it."

It was at this point that Mastodon realised they'd moved to an entirely new point in their careers - they were affecting people in ways they never imagined. This revelation brought Brann a whole new world to consider. "That's what made me realise how important lyrics are, how important subject matter is and how important it is to people. They hold it near and dear and make it their own." It’s an idea he wasn't used to. "I don't treat music like that, I listen to bits and pieces people are playing but a lot of people listen to music lyrically, and I'd say the majority of people are more concerned with what the singer is saying and what the message of the song is. We found that we were getting a lot of people being like, 'Thank you so much this record helped me through a lot', or people sharing their stories. It's like, man, we're helping people. That's far beyond what I thought we were capable of!" Mastodon becoming a beast of its own, helping people, as it always has for Brann, is unexpected yet welcome. "It's always been integral to my life. It's one of the only things I think about on a daily basis; it's all-encompassing. I want it to be someone's everything because it is for me. All I ever wanted from it, I guess, was someone to tell me that this album helped, even just a little bit, because this album helped me. Just being in a band and writing and playing songs is our contribution to the vast world of music, so if we helped in any way, then..." he adopts a comically serious accent, "mission accomplished." Mastodon aren't all doom and gloom however, and Brann wants to make sure everyone knows they have both sides covered. "I never want to be the band that pretends that doesn't exist - to be all fucking serious all the time. We're just normal people, normal dudes, hanging out, being pretty ridiculous most of the time. But when it comes to the music and on stage we take it really seriously, that's another part of us. The humour is the other part of us, and it's all rolled into one. We're not trying to create a false persona, that's what it is."Mastodon’s album ‘Emperor Of Sand’ is out 31st March.