“She was looking at her pill bottles. I knew she was going to die so I was like, ‘Put it down. Live right now’”: Mastodon’s Bill Kelliher wrote songs for Emperor Of Sand at his mum’s deathbed

A family tragedy fuelled the creative fires behind Mastodon’s seventh album Emperor Of Sand. In 2017 Prog met Brann Dailor and Bill Kelliher to discuss the band’s proggiest release since Crack The Skye.

He’s out there somewhere: a lone figure in the middle of the desert. He doesn’t know how to go forward and he can’t go back. Eddies of sand swirl up around him until he disappears out of sight and becomes part of the landscape, a speck of sand among the endless swell of dunes. The sun’s almost at its highest and there’s no water and no shade.

Then, at the periphery of his vision, something moves on the horizon. He shades his eyes to make out the figure that’s approaching. His skin suddenly prickles, turning cold in the sweltering heat. Run, he thinks, but to where? The desert reaches out beyond until it falls into the sky. And the shadow is almost upon him.

“People always get lost in our songs and on our records; there’s always a character trying to find something or someone. It’s like dreams, confused, ‘Where the hell am I?’” Mastodon guitarist Bill Kelliher is also far from home. He’s flown from Atlanta to the UK, and Prog is sitting with him on the fourth floor of his label’s London office off Kensington High Street. Drummer Brann Dailor is seated next to him.

They’re here to talk about their seventh album, Emperor Of Sand, its concept and genealogy – and the bogeyman who haunts the grooves of the record and the dreams of the album’s protagonist. “He’s a metaphor, some kind of Grim Reaper,” says Dailor. “Not a good feeling from that guy, the Emperor.”

It’s a concept album with the hero on the run from a death sentence, with a fate worse than that haunting his every step among the endless dunes. So far, so fantastical – and so very Mastodon. But as Kelliher says: “It all came from a very real place.”

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While the band were making the record, his mother was dying of cancer. He talks now about sitting by her bedside as she slept. After he’d fed her and held her hand, he’d put his headphones on, plug his guitar into his computer and write and play at her side as her life force diminished, bringing songs to life even in the throes of death. “I had to do something to stop myself going crazy,” he says. “To stop from crying my eyes out.”

There’s a cancer ad here in the UK where the patient is portrayed as vulnerable and lost in a faceless, icy tundra, the wind ripping at his clothes, the snow blinding his eyes until a nurse reaches out to him and brings him back to the world. Given Kelliher’s predicament and the fate of his mother, it’s not too difficult to make the transition from a frozen world to the baking sands of an arid, dusty hell.

“That’s how I felt when I lost my ma to cancer,” says Kelliher. “She was wandering lost in her own mind. If you can get a message out of the lyrics and the record and everything it’s, ‘Live in the moment, because you never know.’ When you get handed that death sentence, you’re searching for something – ‘What can I do? Where can I find a cure? What doctors can I call?’ Every day my ma was looking at her pill bottles, and I knew she was going to die, so I was like, ‘Put it down; don’t worry about it. Live right now.’ It’s the little things you get caught up in. You never know when your time’s going to be up.”

The old adage goes that art comes out of adversity, and the death was the spark that lit Mastodon’s creative fire. In Emperor Of Sand they’ve made an album that typifies the unique place they occupy in modern music. It’s enigmatic and driven, with a brilliant, almost compressed sheen; it oozes melody but clanks and hammers like an old steam train taking a hill. It’s full of surprises.

It’s 17 years since Dailor and Kelliher left Victor, New York, and movedto Atlanta to form Mastodon with bassist Troy Sanders and guitarist Brent Hinds. It’s 15 years since they released their debut album Remission. Though it lacked some of the subtlety and grace of their later work, its ferocity was to be admired and not ignored. Displaying a fascination with ‘Elephant Man’ Joseph Merrick, it helped define some of the band’s frenzied tropes.

“We keep evolving,” says Kelliher, “but it’s subconsciously. We’re human beings; we’re getting older – we’re experiencing more things. If you put that first record next to this record, it’s two totally different bands because we’re totally different people.”

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In the space between their first and latest albums they dropped pills, drank liquor, touched the sky, and sang about Moby Dick, colonies of Birchmen and a Blood Mountain. They played prog, rocked out, made metal and crafted their art. In summer 2014 they released Once More ’Round The Sun, an album that embraced their experimental bent and spiraling, escalating arrangements with a newer, more cohesive sense of songwriting. It was an altogether sharper and more focused Mastodon.

“With the last few records, we’ve seen girls at the front screaming and singing along to the songs – I never expected to see that,” says Kelliher. “There are kids there going, ‘My dad turned me on to you guys.’ I’m like, ‘Your dad? How fucking old are you? How old am I?!’ But I feel that each record has to outdo the last and keep going on a trajectory to a different place – which I feel we do. I like this area we’re in right now; I love the type of songs we’re doing.”

For Emperor Of Sand they took a slight U-turn and reached out to producer Brendan O’Brien (Pearl Jam, Rage Against The Machine), who first worked with Mastodon on 2009’s Crack The Skye. “We were thinking maybe Tony Visconti at first,” says Dailor. “We were loving the new Bowie record – it reminded the world how great Visconti is too. I went to New York and I was going to meet with him, but I didn’t do it. I wasn’t sure where everyone in our band was at; are we really going to go to New York to do a record? It just seemed like a bad idea. Bill was going through a horrible situation; Troy was going through some stuff as well, I didn’t have the best situation going on, Brent was butterflying around, doing his GTO band…”

“And Brendan’s from the Atlanta area,” says Kelliher. “We wanted someone we could trust and we had a studio in mind, The Quarry, in Kennesaw. It’s a drive, but we could still sleep in our beds every night. We needed that base to make it work.”

“I think it was important for us to have some familiarity – and let’s not forget, it’s Brendan O’Brien!” says Dailor. “He understands that fine line between prog, catchy melodies, metal… He said, ‘You guys are writing pop music: it’s like a bunch of crazy people writing pop songs!’”

Picking up where they’d left off with O’Brien wasn’t a problem. “It was like seeing an old friend,” says Kelliher. “‘Let’s all make a beautiful record together.’ He was very excited about it and was there hands-on 24/7 – the band needed that. I felt more camaraderie with Brendan on this record, just because of where I was in my life. With Crack The Skye it was mostly Brent, his riffs and his songs that we all helped put together. It was more his vision, him and Brendan. With this it was kind of the other way around. I felt closer to it; not in control of the ship necessarily, but getting my input in and bouncing ideas off him. It was great.”

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“Also, he’s very committed to a fast decision,” says Dailor. “Even when it comes to deciding where you’re going to eat! He has this spontaneity: ‘Did you say you had an idea for this vocal part? Go sing it; great, let’s keep it – that works, let’s finish it.’ And it doesn’t have to be perfect as long as it has the energy, which he’s great at capturing. On Crack The Skye he was like, ‘Let’s get into some percussion.’ I was like, ‘I don’t play percussion,’ but then I did!”

Bassist Troy Sanders has stated that Emperor Of Sand “ties into our entire discography,” adding: “It’s 17 years in the making, but it’s also a direct reaction to the last two years. We draw inspiration from very real things in our lives.”

Dailor reflects that the lead protagonist dies, and is yet saved, at the story’s end. Whether it’s an allegory for the ravages of cancer and the loneliness and suffering brought on by terminal illness, or simply the story of a lost soul trying to find his way through endless desert sands with Death at his shoulder, the message is implicit: Mastodon are moving forward, progressing ever further. Here they come, blinking into the light.

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