MASTODON Trivia — 33 Entries
33 sourced facts about MASTODON.
Trivia
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Curl of the Burl" is a song about stealing lumps of wood. A burl is a growth that forms in a tree under stress — Brann Dailor likens it to a cancer — and the compressed, whorled grain inside it is prized: furniture makers will pay well for a good one. From that, Dailor built a scenario about methamphetamine users in the Pacific Northwest heading into the forest with a chainsaw, hunting the perfect burl to haul back to town and sell. Trees were his private theme for the record; after Crack the Skye he had gone out and bought books on tree folklore and the hidden life of trees. The song's opening line sits oddly against all of that, and when it was put to Brent Hinds he answered only in riddles.
Before Skinner painted the cover of Once More 'Round the Sun, he and Brann Dailor talked it through. What Dailor brought him was the thinking behind the album's title and a particular way of seeing the sun — not as a light source but as a beast, a creature standing for the whole span between life and death. Skinner had been a Mastodon fan for years and found the commission unlike any he had had: nobody, he said, had ever asked him to put a universe on a record sleeve because they believed he could. What he wanted from it was a return to a time when the art on a record shaped how people felt about the music inside — something he considers largely lost.
Emperor of Sand came close to being a Tony Visconti record. The band had been taken with David Bowie's last album and the reminder it gave of what Visconti could do, and Brann Dailor travelled to New York for a meeting — then did not go through with it. What stopped him was the state everyone was in: Bill Kelliher was watching his mother die, Troy Sanders had troubles of his own, Dailor's own circumstances were poor, and Brent Hinds was off flitting between side projects. Uprooting all of that to New York to make a record looked like a bad idea. They went instead to Brendan O'Brien, who had produced Crack the Skye, and his skill was only half the reason. O'Brien is from the Atlanta area, and the studio they wanted — The Quarry, in Kennesaw — was a drive but close enough that every one of them could sleep in his own bed each night. That, Kelliher has said, was the base the band needed to make it work.
A good deal of Emperor of Sand was written next to a sickbed. Bill Kelliher's mother was dying of cancer while the record was being made. He would feed her and hold her hand, and once she was asleep he would put headphones on, run his guitar into his computer, and play and write beside her. His reason was not inspiration: he has said he needed something to do or he would have cried himself apart. Years later he described the same stretch more plainly still — a laptop and a guitar at her hospice bedside, and a lot of the album's demo overdubs cut right there.
The riff that opens Emperor of Sand had been sitting unused for roughly six years. Bill Kelliher had it, along with a closing riff and a bridge, but never the verse and chorus that would join them — an excellent riff with nowhere to live. He has described it as a lone wolf with no friends. It finally came together during these sessions, and the song it grew into, "Sultan's Curse," ended up opening the record.
Mastodon did not go looking for a new producer for Hushed and Grim; they were talked into meeting one. Happy with how Crack the Skye and Emperor of Sand had turned out, they expected to work with Brendan O'Brien again, but Warner Bros. asked them to speak to other candidates. David Bottrill was among them, and he came recommended: the band are close to Tool, who had worked with him and told them he was the man. What won them over was his preparation — by the first video call he had listened to every demo and arrived with detailed notes on each song. His fingerprints are on the sound, too. For a couple of tracks he had them stack five takes of the same clean guitar part, each cut to a slightly different reference pitch — A=440, then 442, 445, 446 — so that the small disagreements between them produced a natural chorus effect. He also reined in a band that admits it does not know how to slow down, and pushed for key changes when a song had stayed in one place too long.
Marrow Deep runs on Greek myth: the three Fates, and the fragile threads that tie life, loss and destiny together. Reaching for mythology at all was Brann Dailor's idea, and so was settling on the Moirai as the album's spine. Troy Sanders has pointed out — while allowing it is probably coincidence — that the band's core is now three people, himself, Bill Kelliher and Dailor, and that a figure standing for the past, the present and whatever comes next maps onto exactly where Mastodon finds itself. The record closes on a track called "The Three Fates."
The raw material for Marrow Deep accumulated on the road. Bill Kelliher travels with a Pro Tools rig and writes constantly, and by Troy Sanders' account the work began in earnest during 2024, on the North American Ashes of Leviathan run with Lamb of God, when it became clear the band had to stop touring Hushed and Grim and start the next thing. The first half of 2025 went on demos cut in the small studio in Kelliher's basement, and the pile grew to thirty-two skeleton songs — too many, so the job turned to cutting it down. Recording proper began in September 2025. All five members were in the room together for five weeks, and what Sanders names as his proudest part of the record is not anything on it: it is that for those five weeks everybody was aligned.
Mastodon got its name on a couch in Bill Kelliher's apartment. The band had spent 2000 throwing names around and discarding them when Brent Hinds noticed the tattoo on Kelliher's arm — a Star Wars piece, the Boba Fett insignia, which to Hinds looked like a mammoth skull. He could not retrieve the name of the animal he was reaching for, something like a prehistoric elephant, and when Kelliher offered "a mastodon?" the question was settled on the spot. What had not been settled was the spelling. The shirts printed for their first couple of shows read "Mastadon"; only after Kelliher looked the word up did the band switch to the o.
Before they landed on Mastodon there was a long list. The discarded candidates Kelliher rattled off were Abra Cadaver, Everyday I'm Dead, Savage Hamper, Rabid Taxi and Fishy Joe and the Pickles. In the same piece he argued that a band's name has to work like packaging — a glimpse of what is inside — and named The Jesus Lizard, after the reptile that runs across water, and Neurosis as examples of the form done well. He also reckoned he had seen a genuinely good band held back by a genuinely bad name.
The two men at the centre of Mastodon started out on opposite sides of the stage. Newly arrived in Rochester, New York, Bill Kelliher was dragged out by a friend to see a local band called Lethargy. Brann Dailor was the drummer, and Kelliher assumed they were a touring act from out of state — that was how good they sounded. When Lethargy lost a guitarist, Kelliher stepped in and stayed for several years, though the two of them were never close in that period: band practice and the odd drink, nothing more. What actually bonded them came later. Dailor was invited to audition for Today Is The Day and, months on, called Kelliher in to play bass. The two ended up alone in Dailor's cramped studio in the small town of Clinton, Massachusetts, playing at all hours with a film running in the background — and that is where the friendship was made.
The tidy version of the origin story has all four men meeting at a High on Fire show in Atlanta. Kelliher's own account is messier. He says he had already met Brent Hinds on an earlier trip to Atlanta to visit his girlfriend, taken between Today Is The Day tours. Once that band collapsed he talked Dailor into moving south with him — the girlfriend had a place for them — and the timing turned out to be exact: he and Dailor had started writing, and Hinds and Troy Sanders were watching their own band fall apart. What each side brought is unglamorous and specific. Hinds and Sanders had a working knowledge of touring the Southeast, Sanders had a van, and there were leftover songs from their old band; Kelliher and Dailor had a couple of their own. And through Today Is The Day, Relapse Records was already paying attention, asking to hear whatever the new group recorded first.
The band's first release was hand-assembled in the most literal sense. According to Troy Sanders the EP that became Lifesblood started life under the name Nine Song Demo and came together in something like four to six weeks. Nothing went to a pressing plant. They burned the discs one at a time on a home DVD duplicator, took every dollar they had to a copy shop to run off the sleeves, and ended up with roughly sixty CDs. Even that was not the end of it: the cutting and pasting carried on in the van on the way to the show.
Nick Johnston ended up in Mastodon because of a standing coffee date. Early in his career, when he was still trying to work out how the industry functioned, Johnston leaned on Brendon Small as a mentor and the two met up regularly. Brann Dailor turned up to one of those hangs, and he and Johnston hit it off. Johnston's own theory is that his track record with drummers — Gavin Harrison and Marco Minnemann among them — meant Dailor already felt he knew him. Dailor told him at the time that he would be the first call if anything ever opened up, and that is exactly how it went. Kelliher, for his part, had said the band was not simply looking for another good guitar player, but for someone all of them got along with and could last with.
There was a point at which the band genuinely expected to end. In 2007, immediately after MTV's video awards, Hinds was assaulted and suffered a serious head injury. Dailor's account is that he had been wandering around a casino, provoked the wrong person, was punched, and did the worst of the damage when he went down and hit his head. Dailor says they thought they might lose him. Kelliher is blunter: he thought the band was finished, and expected the brain damage to be permanent and severe. What happened instead was that Hinds spent the recovery with an acoustic guitar, writing. The material that came out of it became Crack the Skye, which Kelliher describes as a kind of rebirth, and which left Sanders in awe of everything his bandmate was bringing in at the time.
Troy Sanders, speaking in the band's own film, places the low point of Mastodon at the Hushed and Grim period. Through the making of that double album, he says, Hinds had visibly detached — from the band and from the effort he put into it. Sanders describes those sessions as the most separate the four of them had ever been while standing in the same studio, and says drink and everything around it had its claws in Hinds harder than at any earlier point. The touring that followed he rates as the weakest the band had been, in cohesion and in performance, for a decade; he already sensed at the time that once a band plateaus, the only direction left is down.
Six consecutive Mastodon studio albums, from Leviathan through Emperor of Sand, each carry exactly one track with Neurosis' Scott Kelly on guest vocals: "Aqua Dementia," "Crystal Skull," the title song of Crack the Skye, "Spectrelight," "Diamond in the Witch House" and "Scorpion Breath." The single gap is the 2002 debut Remission, and the reason has nothing to do with scheduling. By Brann Dailor's account it simply took him a couple of years to work up the nerve to ask at all — being turned down, as he put it, is a fairly common thing to be afraid of.
The Kelly connection predates Mastodon itself. In 1999 Brann Dailor was in Europe drumming for Today Is the Day on a tour supporting Neurosis, not long after losing his teenage sister Skye, and the two of them spent the quiet stretches of that tour talking. Kelly's advice was blunt: forget all this, go and start your own band. Dailor has since pointed to those conversations as the catalyst for Mastodon, and describes Kelly as the older brother he badly needed at that point in his life.
Scoring the 2010 film Jonah Hex was Mastodon's first piece of film work, and the offer came directly from the director. Jimmy Hayward had been playing Blood Mountain on repeat and simply rang the band up; Troy Sanders told Paste that it arrived out of nowhere, from a fan, and that as ways for a collaboration to start go, it could hardly have been more genuine. The working method had nothing in common with making an album either — they watched footage in the studio and assembled the cues on the spot. Reprise put out a six-track EP drawn from the score on June 29, eleven days after the film opened.
The Jonah Hex score began with an entirely different partner. When Mastodon were brought in, in September 2009, the composer attached was John Powell; reshoots and the re-editing that followed stretched the schedule, and Powell — already booked for Knight and Day and Fair Game — had to leave. Brent Hinds was clear that there was no bad feeling in it, only a deadline Powell could not wait out. Marco Beltrami took over and pulled the music in another direction, and by then Hinds was mid-way through a world tour, with no space to work out what the film should sound like before the new scenes arrived. Being creative, as he put it, is hard when every day is the same set of motions.
Mastodon appeared in Game of Thrones twice, and the way in was a song. Early in 2015 they contributed "White Walker" to the show's official mixtape Catch the Throne, Vol. 2; co-creator Dan Weiss, a fan of the band, then invited them onto the set. Brann Dailor, Bill Kelliher and Brent Hinds turn up as wildling warriors north of the Wall — killed, and then raised again by White Walkers. Dailor's statement at the time is worth reading: he watched two of his closest friends murdered in front of him, was stabbed in the stomach and had his throat cut several times over, and did not mind in the least. Two years later the same three were back for the season seven finale, this time marching south with the army of the dead.
Mastodon's Summer Sonic 09 slot put them on the Marine Stage at Chiba Marine Stadium on 8 August, second up, between opener Hollywood Undead and The All American Rejects. Gekirock's reviewer recorded that the crowd at the front of the stadium had thinned to roughly half of what the previous band drew. There was no intro tape — the band simply walked out and started with "Oblivion," the opening track of the then-current Crack the Skye. What followed leaned the other way: "Bladecatcher," "Colony Of Birchmen," "The Wolf Is Loose" and "Crystal Skull," four songs in a row off the preceding Blood Mountain, with only "The Czar" and the title track drawn from the new record after that. The writer's verdict was that a slot on the metal-heavy third-day Mountain Stage would have served them better.
It took fifteen years for Mastodon to play a show in Japan that was theirs alone. That night was 1 April 2015 at Liquidroom in Ebisu. Everything before it had been a festival or a package tour — Extreme The Dojo, Loud Park, Summer Sonic 09 — and BARKS noted that roughly six years had passed since the last of those. The band arrived in Tokyo by way of New Zealand and Australia and played about eighty minutes with almost no stage talk, opening with "Tread Lightly" and working through eight of the eleven songs on Once More 'Round the Sun. The reviewer deliberately withheld the setlist so as not to spoil the Osaka show at BIG CAT the following night.
Mastodon did not pick "High Road" as the lead single from Once More 'Round the Sun. Bill Kelliher said the choice belonged to the record company, on the reasoning that they are the ones who know what works. As far as he was concerned any track could have been it, and he named two that might just as easily have gone out first: "Chimes At Midnight" and "Diamond In The Witch House."
Mastodon played Download Japan 2022 on 14 August at Makuhari Messe, halls one through three. The festival had first landed in Japan in 2019; the 2020 edition was cancelled by the pandemic, so this was the make-good three years later. Their eleven-song set began with "Pain With An Anchor" and ended with "Blood And Thunder." Gekirock's report describes spiders and a kraken glowing in the dark crawling across the backdrop behind them, and notes that on "Black Tongue" Brent Hinds and Bill Kelliher turned to face each other and played it grinning.