MASTODON

Blood Mountain, the band's first album for a major label, reached Japanese shops on 11 October 2006 as WPCR-12457, with a live version of "Crystal Skull" appended as a thirteenth track marked exclusive to the domestic pressing. The first line on Warner Music Japan's page for the record is not about the music at all — it announces that the band is coming to Loud Park 06. The festival opened on 14 October, which put the domestic CD in stores three days ahead of it.

Source: Warner Music Japan (Mastodon, Blood Mountain product page)

An extra song is not the only way a Japanese edition can justify itself. For Once More 'Round the Sun (WPCR-15738, 25 June 2014) Warner Music Japan led not with a bonus track but with a piece of text: a translation of the band's own song-by-song commentary, printed in the domestic edition and nowhere else. The same listing also renders all eleven titles in katakana alongside the English.

Source: Warner Music Japan (Mastodon, Once More 'Round The Sun product page)

Asked in 2014 to leave a word for Japanese listeners, Bill Kelliher reached back for when Mastodon had last been over and landed on Loud Park, before the tsunami — he was not certain. He had been to the country more recently than the band had, though: earlier that same year he played Tokyo and Nagoya with another group, and used the trip to go toy shopping at Mandarake. Japanese anime and Japanese toys, he explained, are a weakness of his.

Source: Gekirock (Mastodon, Bill Kelliher interview, part 2; interviewer Ryosuke Aragane)

When "Sultan's Curse" took Best Metal Performance at the 60th Grammy Awards, it was the first Grammy anyone in Mastodon had ever won. The rest of the category was August Burns Red, Body Count, Code Orange and Meshuggah — three of them nominated for the first time. What the band reached for straight afterwards was not their own record but the groups who made the category possible at all, thanking Judas Priest and Black Sabbath before anything else.

Source: GRAMMY.com (60th GRAMMY Awards report)

Loud Park 06 ran on 14 and 15 October at Makuhari Messe halls 9, 10 and 11, and Mastodon were placed on the second day. On the festival's own artist listing that day's bill is headed The Unholy Alliance Stage, sharing it with Slayer, Children of Bodom, In Flames, Lamb of God and Bloodsimple. Follow the site's news announcements and the Japanese itinerary keeps going: on the 16th they were attached to Slayer's own show at Shinkiba Studio Coast, advertised as "Slayer (with Mastodon)", and on the 17th they were listed for Loud Park Osaka at Zepp Osaka with Slayer and In Flames again. Three nights back to back.

Source: LOUD PARK 06 official site (news and artist listings)

The thudding figure that opens "Blood and Thunder" was not written by either guitarist. It came from drummer Brann Dailor, who at the time could barely play guitar — Bill Kelliher rates his bandmate's guitar playing about as highly as his own drumming, which is to say not highly at all. Dailor wrote riffs anyway and handed them to Kelliher to realise. The trouble was that the two men heard rhythm differently, and the part kept slipping out of time until Dailor corrected where the accent fell. Kelliher likened that single adjustment to being taught a new kind of arithmetic. Dailor's own memory of the riff coming together is of the whole band locked into it in one room, playing it over and over because it felt that good.

Source: Louder / Metal Hammer (the story behind Blood and Thunder)

The roared middle section of "Blood and Thunder" is not sung by anyone in Mastodon. It is Neil Fallon of Clutch, whose band had just spent six weeks on the road with them — and whom Mastodon, being fans, could barely work up the nerve to ask. The hospitality that followed was just as earnest. The band were living two to a room across two units at an extended-stay motel; when Fallon arrived to cut his part, all four of them crammed into one and gave him the other to himself. The rooms were adjacent, and through the wall they heard him calling them back. When a couple of them went over, he told them none of this was necessary — someone could take the spare bed, and he would happily sleep on the floor.

Source: Louder / Metal Hammer (the story behind Blood and Thunder)

There was supposed to be a Crack the Skye film. The story — Tsarist Russia, astral projection and time travel, wormholes, questions of faith — was visual enough that the band genuinely wanted to shoot it. Money decided otherwise. Brann Dailor has said the entire budget they had went instead into producing the clips that ran behind them as stage backdrops, an expense he still regards as worthwhile. The only route left, as he saw it, was for the four of them to write a treatment and send one member out in business clothes to pitch a Hollywood studio, which was never going to be Mastodon. He files the film among the ambitions that got away.

Source: Louder (Prog magazine's 2010 Brann Dailor interview, republished)