Mastodon’s Brann Dailor Spills the Beans on Band’s Next Album
Axl and I were talking the other day about how rough being in a small-to-mid sized metal band is, and how it’s no wonder young, struggling bands have so many member changes. It’s a long journey for bands to get to the level where they’re making a living from their music, don’t have day jobs, and live comfortably, and you’d be surprised just how many bands you think of as “successful” don’t make much if any money at all.
And then Axl uttered these incredibly on-point words of wisdom: “You can tell if a band is making money or not if their members are over 30 and they’re not going through frequent line-up changes.” Bingo.
Mastodon are a successful band not only because they meet this criterion — two of their members are over 40, and the other two are soon-to-be — but also because duh, they’re Mastodon, they’re one of the biggest bands in metal. Metal Insider recently interviewed drummer Brann Dailor, and here’s what he offered on keeping a stable lineup all these years:
You’ve been a band for a long time. No personnel changes, no craziness, and i know there’s some volatility in the band. What’s your secret to remaining a unit?
Eat healthy and plenty of exercise, Bram. I don’t know I guess it’s a respect for one another and a respect for Mastodon and the art that it is and we all want to keep doing it. At this point it’s sort of easy. It pays the bills, it’s a fun life, and none of us want to see it go away. At the end of it all, we’re good friends and we can look past differences or if there’s bad drunk behavior we chalk it up to just that. Everyone has chilled out in the last few years, and we just respect each other’s space. It would so strange if one person left the band because we live so close to each other and we’d see each other at the grocery store and be like “Hey man, um yeah we’ve got this other guy playing.” It would be so strange to have someone else in the band. If someone would want to leave that would be their prerogative, but kicking someone out of the band would take a lot, because we’ve had a lot happen. At the end of the day we love each other like brothers and it’s my extended family so I could never see something other than death taking it away. But like I said, if someone decided, “Hey man it’s not for me anymore and I don’t want to be on tour and I’m just done with the lifestyle. It’s hard being away from home all the time and it’s not easy…” At the moment everything is good. We’ve had some time off, went to Australia played like seven shows in two weeks and that was really fun. And we’re about to start digging in again pretty soon. I take a deep breathe as I say that. Oh boy here we go.
Read the rest of the interview here; Dailor gives a lot of juicy quotes about the band’s next album Once More Around the Sun.
