For some bands, the time off caused by the coronavirus quarantine has been a strange creative mire in which it’s hard to think straight much less create. For Mastodon, it’s been almost too fertile a creative breeding ground. According to a new interview with drummer Brann Dailor, Mastodon not only have an album’s worth of new material ready to go — they have two.
“It is a good problem to have,” Brann told Full Metal Jackie at Loudwire. “It’s also a little bit stressful because I feel we have had too much time off. Like a lot of groups, we have had too much time and we’re constantly working. We had the shut down for a couple of months, but we’re back at it.
“I guess it’s a good thing we’re still wanting to come down here and wanting to work on our 20-year-old project that we have been calling Mastodon,” continued the drummer. “It’s exciting to me because every time you go to approach writing new stuff, you say, ‘Well, when is this well going to dry up? When are we going to go looking and can’t find it anymore?’
“Sometimes you do have a mild case of writer’s block or maybe you have a severe case of writer’s block. That isn’t the case with us, luckily. We have an abundance of material and a lot of really great things. The hardest part is going to be picking the ones that go on the actual album because there are too many songs at this point. We want to put maybe 10-12 songs on the album and we have like 30.”
When Jackie expresses her amazement at that amount, Brann laughs and agrees that it’s a lot, adding, “That’s too much!” However, he’s also quick to note that while he’s not against the idea of the band recording two albums one after another, he’s not sure a double album is the way to go.
“As much as I think it’s kind of not the best to have one in the chamber, I don’t necessarily think it’s great for us to release a double album,” says Brann. “I don’t see the problem recording a full length album and then because of the fact that we are not going to be able to go on tour immediately, record another full length album not far after. I think that that’s a possibility that we will have an abundance of music and we will have an abundance of stuff that we really dig that we can release to the public while we are still in this muck.”
Keep your eyes peeled for one if not two new Mastodon albums in the near future!
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Words by Chris Krovatin
