The last person who wanted Mastodon’s Brann Dailor to sing on Oblivion was Brann Dailor. Actually, that’s not quite true. The Atlanta band’s big-shot new producer, Brendan O’Brien, didn’t want him to sing on the opening track and second single from their fourth album, 2009’s Crack The Skye, either.
“Brendan thought it was gonna be the big song on the record,” says Brann today, speaking from his home in Atlanta as his dog barks in the background. “He said, ‘There’s no way I’m having the drummer be the first voice that’s heard on the record. The last thing in the world I want is you guys going on [Late Show With] David Letterman and the freakin’ drummer’s singing.’ I was like, ‘I’m with you.’”
In the end, the freakin’ drummer did sing on Oblivion – only his second-ever lead vocal, albeit one that was shared with bassist Troy Sanders and guitarist Brent Hinds. But in every other respect, Brendan’s instincts were right.
Crack The Skye marked a vibe shift for Mastodon, a key staging post in their transformation from darlings of the sludge metal underground into a bona fide crossover success story. And Oblivion, in all its shapeshifting yet weirdly commercial glory, was the spearhead for this new direction.
“The thing is, Oblivion almost didn’t make the record,” reveals Brann. “It was the last thing we put together. If it wasn’t for Brendan, it wouldn’t have been on there.”
Even before Crack The Skye, Mastodon had never wanted for acclaim. Their 2002 debut album, Remission, and 2004’s follow-up, Leviathan, were showered with critical plaudits, even though they were both too abrasive to trouble the mainstream. That needle began to move with 2006’s major label debut, Blood Mountain, the four-piece’s headmelting prog metal coming-out party. Much was expected of the follow-up, even if the band themselves weren’t thinking of it in commercial terms.
“We weren’t sure what we wanted to do,” recalls Brann. “There wasn’t any kind of plan. The biggest thing was that Brent was coming out of a significant head injury that he had sustained.”
In September 2007, Mastodon had performed at the MTV Music Awards in Las Vegas. After the show, Brent got into a drunken altercation with System Of A Down bassist Shavo Odadjian and an acquaintance, musician William Hudson, that ended with the Mastodon guitarist being hospitalised with a brain haemorrhage after being punched to the ground and cracking his head on the sidewalk. He recovered, though the incident left him with severe vertigo.
“It was hard for him to get down to practice,” says Brann. “He spent a lot of days with his acoustic guitar at home. Him waking up and just trying to deal with his vertigo meant his playing became a little softer, but with all these wild chord progressions. The whole thing had this emotional depth to it that I could feel coming from Brent.”
They may not have been thinking of chart positions, but that didn’t mean they weren’t ready to step up in other areas. Brendan O’Brien was an A-list producer with an A-list CV: clients included Bruce Springsteen, AC/DC, Pearl Jam and Korn. Like Mastodon, he was based out of Atlanta, but the band figured they were too far down the food chain for him to be interested in them.
“We thought there was no way he was gonna want to work with a lowly metal band,” says Brann. “But we met with him and he was into it.”
Mastodon gathered at their rehearsal space to play Brendan the songs they’d written so far. Oblivion wasn’t among them – it was more an unfinished collection of ideas that an actual song. But they ran through it anyway.
“And he went: ‘What is that?’” says Brann. “I had some vocals worked out for the verse, so I started singing that, and Brent was singing along to the guitar line for the chorus. And Brendan said: ‘Whatever that is, we need to go directly to the studio and record it! Everything else is great, but that’s the song!’”
Starting in the spring of 2008, Mastodon began working on Crack The Skye in the producer’s Southern Tracks Studio, just a few blocks from Brann’s house. “I had no idea it was there,” he says. “It’s in the basement of this house that I would drive past every single day for years. I had no idea that Bruce Springsteen was down there, Pearl Jam, Bob Dylan…”
The big sticking point when it came to recording Oblivion was who would sing it. Brann had always contributed vocal ideas to Mastodon but had only sung lead on one song, unleashing a harsh death metal roar on Battle At Sea from their very first nine-song demo, released in 2000 and reissued in 2006 as Call Of The Mastodon.
But that had been out of necessity after none of his bandmates showed up to the studio on the day they were supposed to record the vocals. Since then, Troy and Brent had split the singing duties between them.
“I went in and laid down an idea I had for Oblivion as placeholder for Troy to replicate,” he says. “But Brent said: ‘Man, there’s something about your voice I like.’ I went, ‘OK, cool, but we’re not keeping it.’”
Brendan O’Brien was of the same mind. The producer was determined to get a version with Troy singing that sounded exactly like Brann’s original rough version. Eventually he got it.
“We all listened back to it, and everyone was like, ‘Yeah, that sounds great,’” says Brann. “And Brent went, ‘Yeah, that sounds awesome. But let’s hear Brann’s again, just to make sure.’ I knew it in my gut what was gonna happen. Brent was like, ‘Yeah, Brann, I’m sorry, you’re gonna have to figure it out.’ Even Brendan was going, ‘He’s right, goddammit.’”
![Mastodon - Oblivion (Official Music Video) [HD Remaster] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/s6WGNd8QR-U/maxresdefault.jpg)
Oblivion became the first Mastodon song to feature three lead vocalists: Brann on the verses, including the opening one, Troy on the pre-chorus, Brent on the chorus. Even now, Brann has mixed feelings about his dual role on the song.
“The last thing I wanted to do was to sing and play drums. It sucks. And it annoys people, ’cos they can’t tell where the vocals are coming from.”
If the drummer was doubtful of his value as Mastodon’s third singer, the story he cooked up for Crack The Skye helped push it into another realm. The vividly psychedelic and sometimes hard-to-follow concept centred around a paraplegic boy who gets lost while astral travelling, and takes in wormhole theory, early 20th century Russian mystic Rasputin and the Devil himself.
“Oblivion is the beginning of it,” says Brent. “This astral umbilical cord that tethers him gets burnt up by the sun and he’s basically lost in a wormhole.”
But the concept was also partly inspired by the death by suicide of Brann’s sister, Skye, when she was 14 and the drummer was 15. He was supposed to be at home that night, but stayed out “because I was tripping at this guy’s house”.
In Oblivion, the drummer sings: ‘I tried to bore a hole into the ground / Breaking all the fingers and the nails from my hand.’ It’s a reference to a real-life incident when Brann, high on LSD at his sister’s grave, attempted to dig down to her coffin using his hands (he gave up, only to see a vision of his sister in the sky).
“The whole story of Crack The Skye is like a redemption story for me and my perceived involvement in her passing,” he says. “I know it’s not my fault, but it’s hard to convince yourself of that when what happened happened and you can’t fix it. But when I can come up with this fantastical thing where Rasputin goes and saves this person and brings them back to their body and everything’s OK… I don’t love the word ‘closure’, but it helps a little bit.”
Oblivion was released as a single on February 16, 2009, a month ahead of Crack The Skye. The album’s first single, Divinations, may have kicked off with a banjo, but it still seethed and raged like the Mastodon of old. By contrast, Oblivion was more melodic, less jagged.
“It felt like we were stepping out a bit – it was a shift,” says Brann. “I wasn’t sure what our diehard fans were gonna think. Initially people were not stoked at all. In fact they fucking hated it. I’ve read things where people say, ‘When Brann started singing, he ruined the band.’ But then some people say, ‘He’s the secret weapon.’ I’m pretty sure I ruined the band! Ha ha ha!”
Mastodon are on tour throughout 2025, including Bloodstock Festival in the UK and Sonic Temple in the US.
