A Conversation with Brann Dailor – HuffPost 5.28.14

Mike Ragogna: Brann, let’s talk about all things Once More ‘Round The Sun. This is a follow-up to The Hunter, a pretty successful album. How is this music-y career path thing going for you so far man?

Brann Dailor: I think it’s going swimmingly. It’s going really well. I’m confident about the album and overall confident about all things Mastodon. We just came off of a very succesful three-week tour between albums, that’s not always the easiest thing to do but it was really good. I think we’re playing better than ever and singing better than ever, ti’s fun.

MR: Are you noticing things that are really gelling now because of these different circumstances?

BD: I’m not really sure. It just seems like it’s gotten tighter. I noticed it in our trip to Australia a few months ago. I don’t know what happened, but we all kind of settled in and elevated. That’s how I feel, anyway, I’m sure there are a lot of people that would beg to differ, but I feel like the performances got a little better, we all have our little vocal warmups that we do before the show, we’re just trying a lot harder to deliver instead of go out there, vocally flub it and then afterwards be like, “Aw, man.” I feel like we’re taking more control and trying harder to deliver the goods that our albums promise. It’s always a work in progress for us, we’re three reluctant singers, but I think it’s better than ever at the moment, I look forward to the next couple of years and proving to people that we can sing live.

MR: [laughs] Some people worry, “They can make records, but how many machines are working behind them on stage?”

BD: Yeah, a lot of bands have Pro Tools and all the rigs going, so everyone thinks that they’re that f**king good, but they’re not. Almost every band I can point to, I know that there are tracks going on, there’s all the backing track vocals or even main track vocals going on. So much of that stuff happens and we’re so reluctant to join that, even thought we know sometimes we listen back and go, “Yikes, that was pretty bad,” or, “Oh my god, we’re just not hitting that note,” but we just say, “Okay, we’ll do it better next time,” not give in and say, “Oh well, I guess we’ll just fire up the tracks.” People would know at this point, they’d be like, “Oh my god, the vocals sound so good there’s obviously no way they’re doing that. So we’re just giving it the old college try. We really do care about it and want it to sound awesome, but we want it to be authentic. If we’re screwing it up then it’s us screwing it up, you know what I mean? We are out there and we are trying, but we definitely don’t want to resort to the tracks, you know what I mean? They sound great, I’ve got to admit I’m jealous sometimes that they have it like that. “That sounds perfect, because it is the recorded version.”

MR: But then again, are fans going to the concert to hear the CD?

BD: I don’t know; nowadays it may be. I think they’re getting so used to the perfection that that’s the bar. But that’s fine. I feel better walking off stage, personally, even if I hit a sour note, because it was me doing it, trying my hardest to pull it off. There’s something about it, I remember watching Guns ‘N’ Roses live at The Ritz and there were some sour notes; it’s definitely them live. It’s unhinged. It’s not perfect and I like that.

MR: Who were your influences?

BD: Growing up, I guess my mom’s band first and foremost. She was in a rock band that did a lot of covers when I was maybe three or four. They had practice at my house and when I was a kid I thought my mom wrote all of those songs. They basically just played these funtions where they’d have to have about ofur hours of material, so they had everything in there, they played everything form teh Go-Gos to DEVO to Rush, anything that was popular in the early eighties, this was probably 1982 to 1985 or ’86. Everything was in there from Loverboy to Judas Priest. That was a huge influence, obviously. Like I said, they played every night and as I got a little bit older bands like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden and Def Leppard and Mötley Crüe were the bands that I was first attracted to, the imagery was super cool, they always had monsters on their album covers and I was a little kid so I was into that kind of stuff.

MR: You know what’s great about your particular paradigm is that you not only learned the vocabulary of music from your mother, but also how to write songs–and a lot of them–based on her band having to keep learning and playing lots of sets. That had to be a great education.

BD: Yeah, I think so. I guess I always played music and it was always a part of me, but when I was smaller I had a lot of fleeting ideas for careers. I wanted to be a ninja for a little while, and then I wanted to be a drummer in a rock band. Drums were always there, but I wouldn’t play them for six months and then I would say, “I want to play my drums again!” and I’d get back into it. It was not until I’d hit about eleven or twelve that I really started play them every day and get a little more serious about it. Then I started having friends come over and play with me. It was a very social thing for me, it was a way to hang out for even longer and do something that was fun, learn a Metallica song, or try learning an Ozzy song or whatever, whatever the guitar player that got dropped off at my house knew how to play, that’s what we’d play.

MR: How did the songs on the new album come about? Were they created on the road?

BD: A little bit. There’s a lot of different ways that they come about, but yeah, writing doesn’t really stop altogether when you’re on the road. It’s a little harder to write because it’s harder to get everyone together in the same room on tour and sit down and concentrate on an idea, everyone’s got their whatever going on, “I’m going to go to this record store,” “I’m oging to go get some food,” and people are kind of exhausted anyway, but I found that Bill [Kelliher] was writing a lot on tour for him and hit newfound sobriety, he was really trying to find himself out there and figure out what he was going to fill his time with if it wasn’t going to be drinking or whatever. So he found a lot of time it helped him to just sit in a room and get his guitar and his ProTools and have his headphones on and just riff, riff away. A lot of that stuff found its way onto the new album. By the time we got home and started to dump all of it out and start sorting through everything he had a veritable cornucopia of riffs. A sizeable banquet of heavy mettal riffage. So there are tons of good stuff in there, it’s fun to sort through it. Then Brent [Hinds] always has stuff because he’s constantly going to, so luckily at this point in time there’s no shortage, the well isn’t dry yet. You kind of keep waiting for it to happen. A lot of artists kind of hit that wall. We didn’t really hit the wall, but we’re always nervous that it’s going to present itself. I guess you sort of have to trust that the songs and the material will reveal themselves eventually. Part of my process is being really worried that it won’t.

MR: Yeah, but I have to say that you just came off of a top ten album and this one is primed to be big too, there’s all sorts of stuff lining up for you, so I’m wondering if that worry is an eternal thing. Do you think there’s always that nagging, “It could end tomorrow” voice in the heads of successful musicians?

BD: Of course! I would imagine. I mean, it’s there for me, I would imagine it’s like that for almost everyone. There could be a thousand comments on a song saying how great it is and there would be one bad one and that one will just stick in your craw and make you feel really bad about it. But yeah, ultimately you get up on stage and perform because you want to make people happy I guess, and get that ego stroke or whatever.

MR: I’m imagining performing also makes you very happy.

BD: I really, really enjoy making the record and having the finished product, that’s one of my favorite things in the whole world, the whole process from start to finish, seeing how things reveal themselves and being excited about it together. You know what I mean? Being really excited about a piece of art that we made together. It’s a wonderful feeling and really what keeps me coming back.

MR: This is your sixth album, what separates it from the others in your mind?

BD: It’s got about two to three years’ separation from the other albums. That’s about it. Every album is the exact same in my mind, it’s all the perfect snapshot of where we are as people and the different things that have happened in everyone’s lives are what affects the sound of the album. If something sounds rushed it probably was, and if something sounds like we spent more time on it then we probably did because we could. But we like to put out material, you know what I mean? We don’t like to sit on stuff and labor over it for too long because then it kind of gets away from that perfect snapshot that we’re looking for. When we look behind us we want to have that extensive body of work and we want to have the right amount of work at the end there to look back at and say, “Okay, that’s a pretty good timeline of where we are and who we are as people when we put this stuff out.” I know a lot of musicians and friends of mine who are constantly retooling, they’re just in the studio and songs become years and years old and they never see the light of day and it’s like, “Man, you should’ve put that out years ago, let everybody gobble that up and then give them some more.”

MR: What advice do you have for new artists?

BD: I wouldn’t know what to tell a new artist these days. The only thing that I know stays true is “Make sure that you like what you’re playing, because you might have to play it for a really long time.” Don’t get into the music business thinking you’re going to be rich and famous, because you probably won’t. Get into it because you love your friends and you found some people that you’re musically compatible with and you’re excited about the music that you’re playing and the art that you’re creating and have that be the sole purpose that drives you to do this. If it’s money and fame that’s few and far between. It’s more and more of a rarity, especially with rock and heavy music. So that’s my advice. Do it because you love it.

MR: And what about you? Were there moments where you thought, “This isn’t going to work,” and somebody said to you, “Buck up, buddy?” What was that person’s advice?

BD: No, I don’t feel like that ever happened to me. I was never under the impression that Iw as going to make it as a rocker, I just kind of kept on rocking. [laughs] There’s a naiveté involved there, an ignorance. With Mastodon I didn’t see it getting much further than the bar band stage, and I thought that was a pretty good spot, when we were touring with High On Fire, I thought, “This isn’t bad, I could do this. Come home with a couple grand and then when it’s time to get a real job I’ll get a real job.” But I liked the music, and we kept having hints, good reviews, and then things worked out. It’s been fun. Hopefully life is long, and hopefully I’ve got another forty years of hanging around, so what’s next?

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne