Usually Mastodon brings heaviness worthy of its name. But once in a while, a lighter touch appears in the music. At first, drummer Brann Dailor wasn’t having it as the Atlanta quartet was working on its recently released concept album “Emperor of Sand” (Warner).
In contrast to the technically challenging, hard-hitting arrangements on most of the album, one song, “Show Yourself,” emerged as an unapologetically bouncy, melodic three-minute pop tune. It wasn’t exactly bubblegum — far from it. But Dailor still didn’t trust it.
“I kept pushing that song to the side, like Brussels sprouts on 6-year-old’s dinner plate,” Dailor says with a laugh. “I was thinking to myself, ‘I don’t know if I want to be that band.’ Then I came up with a vocal melody over the top of those riffs, and everyone was saying it’s really catchy. I realized it’s kind of undeniable. That little splashy puddle of a song made sense in the context of what is otherwise a dense record. We needed that. Finally I’m like ‘OK, we can be that band too.'”
That Mastodon has never hewed to a formula can sometimes upset fans who fell in love with the foursome when it was making metal classics such as “Leviathan” (2004) and “Blood Mountain” (2006). Along the way, Dailor and his bandmates — bassist Troy Sanders and guitarists Brent Hinds and Bill Kelliher — have become one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed hard-rock bands of the last decade-plus.
“The more popular your band, the more naysayers there will be,” Dailor says. “People get angry at you for making a song that doesn’t sound like a lot of our other music, but if we dig it, nothing is really off limits to us — we have no preconceived notions of what kind of band we are. The only thing we would shy from is if someone were to come to us and say, ‘Hey, the label wants you to check out this Max Martin song. It’s going to be a hit and you could make a bunch of money.’ That would hurt my punk rock mode too much. But if it’s something we wrote in the basement and we like it, that’s really all I need.”
Dailor says he should take things further and stay off social media to avoid the naysayers. But sometimes he can’t help himself.
“It makes me sad when people aren’t happy with something we did,” he says. “I want people to like me, but not enough to have it govern what we do artistically. I would never try to tailor anything to fit what someone may like. We have to tour a lot to support our families, and if I’m going to leave my family behind I sure don’t want to be playing soul-sucking music.”
That ethos has served the band well in more ways than one. The music has become an outlet for the band members as they deal with family crises and tragedies. The 2009 album “Crack the Skye” saw Dailor writing lyrics that helped him come to grips with his sister’s suicide after she was bullied at school. “Emperor of Sand” came together as Sanders’ wife was undergoing cancer treatments and Kelliher’s mother died of cancer. Dailor’s mother has also been chronically ill for years.
Like much of the band’s best work, it’s a concept album. The story, about a condemned man wandering a desert to find redemption, emerged one guitar riff at a time and each one “had a movie attached to it,” Dailor says.
“It seems whenever we take a break to make record, heavy (stuff) goes down,” the drummer explains. “Your parents will die when you get in your 40s and above. It’s tough and it can be devastating, but we’re lucky to have this platform. The story behind ‘Crack the Skye,’ I can’t tell you the number of people who approached me afterward about it. I didn’t want to talk about it, I thought I can’t keep going into this every day, but over time it helped. It linked us to (Chicago-based suicide-prevention charity) Hope for the Day. That’s all we can do — try to help a little bit.
“Music is therapy for a lot of people, escapism, a place to bury those feelings of frustration and grief, or stew in it by listening to the saddest song you know. We put it all in there and go super deep, because music is the only thing we’ve had to get some of those feelings out into the open. It’s always been there for us, and we need it to get through those days that are darkest. Lyrically, we didn’t want to side-step these issues because it would be a disservice to the music that we were creating in Bill’s basement (studio). And if it can help someone else, that’s the best thing we could hope for. But we didn’t think about that when we wrote it. We were just trying to get through a bad day in our lives the best way we know how.”
Greg Kot co-hosts “Sound Opinions” at 8 p.m. Friday and 2 and 11 p.m. Saturday on WBEZ-FM 91.5.
Greg Kot is a Tribune critic.
greg@gregkot.com
Twitter @gregkot
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