We'd tell each other what the doctors were saying. He lives about a block and a half away from me, so I'd just walk over there and we'd sit and have a cup of coffee and talk about the various states of illness of both of our moms. WHEN YOU WEREN'T WRITING, DID YOU TALK ABOUT WHAT WAS GOING ON WITH YOUR LOVED ONES OR DID YOU KEEP EVERYTHING PRIVATE?īill and I would get together in the mornings. Bill's mom was always the proud parent of the guitar playing son, so the best thing we could do was to go down to Bill's basement and just start jamming and compiling riffs. The best thing to do, really, instead of sitting in a room and watching them be sick, is to continue doing what you do best and continue on with what makes that person proud of you, especially if that person's a parent. You want to be able to wave this magic wand and make everything all better.
What are you going to do? When you have someone in your life that's one of the closest people to you and they're really sick and you're far away it's just frustrating. WAS IT DIFFICULT TO CONCENTRATE CONSIDERING EVERYTHING THAT WAS GOING ON? I put together an outline right away, but I didn't finish the story until we were in the studio tracking the album. I was getting such good visuals from it of the desert, and I just started to see the story coming together cinematically. We had "Sultan's Curse." That was the first song we finished. HOW DID YOU MAKE THE MUSIC WORK WITH THE STORYLINE? But in death he assumes the shape of the Jaguar, which is what the Mayan shamans become when they're going to go into another dimension to fight disease and illness. He fantasizes about this scenario that's not happening while he's being killed by the Sultan's men. Finally, the sultan's men capture him and lead him into a tent, but he's so far gone he's hallucinating that he's going into a tent with the sultan's daughters, who are going to bathe him. They just take advantage of you for your money. They represent the snake oil salesmen, the people that say they can cure you but have no power.
Along the way, he meets these crystalline beings that invite him in. And the different tribes with the different rituals represent the different forms of treatment that you can receive for cancer. He thinks that if he can bring rain it will stop him from dying from dehydration. So as this protagonist is stumbling through the desert he tries to telepathically communicate with tribes throughout the world that have rain rituals and dances. It's what we were all dealing with and we used lyrics to get our experiences across without being too literal. IT SEEMS LIKE THERE ARE METAPHORS ABOUT CANCER THROUGHOUT THE ALBUM. He escapes into the desert to find some kind of sanctuary, but he gets lost and walks through this vast desert for days, and the sun is absolutely crushing him. I tied the sun into radiation. In the story, the protagonist gets handed down a death sentence from a diabolical sultan. And no one knows how much time they've got left. When the sand in the hourglass is gone, your life is over. Video of Mastodon - Sultan' s Curse īRANN DAILOR The Emperor of Sand is kind of like the Grim Reaper. "It's proggy and psychedelic, but super heavy at the same time," Dailor says.
In the end, they created a galvanic and musically adventurous concept album that's reminiscent of their 2009 prog-metal epic Crack the Skye, but colored with more of the melodic straight- ahead rock elements of their last two releases, 2011's The Hunter and 2014's Once More 'Round the Sun. With production by Brendan O'Brien (who also worked on Crack the Skye), Emperor of Sand is dark, fiery, experimental, and cathartic. The sadness, anger and periodic disruptions could have been disastrous to the band's creativity, but the musicians were able to use their music as a coping mechanism, an escape valve from their daily medical-related frustrations.
Dailor's mom has been undergoing chemotherapy for a while, guitarist Bill Kelliher's mom died of a brain tumor while the band was making the record and bassist/vocalist Troy Sanders had to miss early writing sessions while his wife received treatment for breast cancer (she seems to be recovering well). Three out of the four members of Mastodon were directly affected by the disease while making Emperor of Sand. Get those dates below.Sadly, it's a vivid illustration of art imitating life. Mastodon will be touring this May through July Primus, JJUUJJUU, and All Them Witches. "Clandestiny" is off Mastodon's Judas Priest-approved 2016 album Emperor Of Sand.