Mastodon’s Take Us Track-By-Track Through Their New Album

Five years on from Hushed and Grim, Mastodon have returned with their tenth studio album Marrow Deep – a sprawling, deeply personal record forged during one of the most turbulent periods in the Atlanta metal titans’ history. Inspired by the Three Fates of Greek mythology and the fragile threads connecting life, loss and destiny, the album finds founding members Brann Dailor, Troy Sanders and Bill Kelliher processing immense personal upheaval while simultaneously stepping into a new era for the band.

Across its 12 tracks, grief looms particularly large, with Dailor reflecting on the deaths of his mother and founding guitarist Brent Hinds while the band rebuilds around new guitarist Nick Johnston. But Marrow Deep also finds Mastodon pushing forward with renewed creative energy – aided by a wild guest list featuring Josh Homme, Black Sabbath legend Geezer Butler, Gojira’s Joe Duplantier and Clutch’s Neil Fallon. To take us deeper inside the record, Dailor walks Music Feeds through Marrow Deep track-by-track, unpacking the memories, losses, riffs, movie quotes and occasional Dracula obsession behind Mastodon’s new chapter. Read his words down below, or get your ears around the record here.

1. Barbarian’s Blood

Brann Dailor: “This was the last song written for the album. It was originally just some riffs that were floating around way towards the end, and we decided to work on it and put it together about two or three days before we started recording for real in the studio. It really came about last minute, and it ends up being the opener, so you never know! Some of this stuff with Marrow Deep is almost two years old, but Barbarian’s Blood was “new” new. The opening line of “we’re in danger of losing everything” was the sentiment that was in the room when we were starting to work on stuff. Troy [Sanders] had just lost all his worldly possessions and most of his home in a hurricane, and Brent [Hinds] had died just a few days prior. And so we were feeling fragile as people. I think that the aggression on this first song is us maybe pushing back against that and trying to kick that door down.”

2. Poisonous Weapons

Brann Dailor: “This is one of the first songs that we started to be able to play live. We were jamming it at soundcheck, and it was the only one that we could play live (laughs). I mean, there were a couple of other ones where we could get to a certain part, but it would just fall apart because nobody knew how the rest of it went. But we could get through Poisonous Weapons. There was a lot of arrangement stuff that needed to get worked out with it before we were comfortable with it. And this one is from Troy’s standpoint, it’s an angry one. He’s pissed off. And I appreciate that he was able to put himself out there like that and be pissed and let everybody know it.

My section in it, vocally, is more of a warning for the two people, I’m trying to warn them about what’s coming for them. And it ends up with a beautiful solo from Nick [Johnston] that kind of combines with my vocal as it goes into his big solo there. It’s a big moment for him. It’s his first big solo on the record so I was excited for him. I remember sitting in there while he was working it out and just being a cheerleader for him, being like, “yeah!!”. I mean, I did the same thing for Brent. It’s always nice to have somebody in there to let you know that you’re doing a good job, and to point you in the right direction. Sometimes when you’re on the fly making stuff, you’re like, “I don’t know, is this any good?”. It’s nice to have someone to cheer you on. I try to be that dude in there too going, “you’re doing awesome!”. Or massaging parts, being like, “that, but do it like this!”. It’s nice to bounce stuff off of people and work like that. It was our first time working with Nick with a solo of his own. And so it’s exciting for him to get that in there.

This song also has a sample from one of my favorite movies, River’s Edge. It’s from 1986, it’s Keanu Reeves’ very first movie. It was also the movie that I watched the most in the late ’80s when I was 14 or 15, and I would take acid with my best friend. At the end of our acid trip, we would watch that movie. We knew all the lines to River’s Edge and we would quote them constantly. When we would meet other people during the day, we would have to try to play a game where we could work it into the conversation. And the “I feel so fucking alive” bit in this song is from that.

When I first met Joey [Jordison] from Slipknot in 2004, we were in the UK and we were just about to start our tour with them, with Slipknot and Slayer. We were doing our soundcheck and I saw this little guy watching me and I was like, “I think that’s Joey”. I hadn’t met him yet, but when we got done with our soundcheck, he was like, “hey man, I’m Joey.” I’m like, “oh, what’s up, dude?”. We were born in the same year, we had very similar drum trajectories. And we looked out the back of the loading dock and there were two police cars out there that had their lights on. And he said, “somebody fucking narced!”, which is a line from River’s Edge. It’s kind of a deep cut line, so I said the next line, and then it kind of clicked for us like, “oh, wow. You’re deeply well-versed in River’s Edge”. I think my phone bill was $800 when I got back from that tour because Joey and I were going back and forth texting lines from the movie. We would always leave each other notes with lines from that, that was the basis for our relationship. You’d think it’d be us messaging about drums, but it was mainly River’s Edge quotes. I miss that guy.”

3. Your Ghost Again

Brann Dailor: “This one is already out there, so people know. But the chorus really just comes from being in the studio and being in a place where you would normally see somebody that you worked with or lived with. They’re gone now,, but you see them constantly out of the corner of your eye just because you’re so used to them being there. “I saw your ghost again” was from that because that’s what was happening when we were in the studio writing that song or recording the music for it. And as it kind of links up with my mum too, I kept seeing her, you just catch her out of the corner of your eye and you’re like, “oh, shit”. You get hopeful for a second and then no.

Ultimately it’s a song letting them know that, “hey, I saw you and I thought of you again. I hope you’re okay”.”

4. Snakes For Dinner

Brann Dailor: “The first riff in Snakes For Dinner was, I think, the first actual riff written for a Mastodon song by Nick. We didn’t have a beginning for it. Before the verse starts, there’s a lo-fi thing that happens, so we were like, “Nick, we need an opening for this song”. He was chomping at the bit to do something, to write anything, because Bill [Kelliher] and I had written all this music for the whole record already. We’d been pouring over it for the last couple of years. But here was Nick’s chance to write a riff, and this was the first one that he contributed to the album.

The chorus, “when you left, you took the moon and stars”, it’s like the next day after someone close to you is gone, you kind of feel like they took everything with them and it’s physically draining and you feel like shit. That was the sentiment that I could come up with with Brent and with my mum in the days after they were gone. It was the same even with my sister. It just feels like they took everything that was good and it’s gone. We all experience it over time, it starts to come back and you know it’s going to be okay. But at the moment of impact, it feels so different.

Josh Homme’s on this one too, our good friend. He hasn’t contributed to anything, for 20 years he’s been slacking! He’s got his own band apparently. They’re busy (laughs). But it’s always nice to have your friends chip in. He’d been on my mind because the day after Brent passed, I was in my hotel room in Alaska, it was in the morning and Josh called. He didn’t say anything about Brent, but he just said something like, “why didn’t you tell me about some food item? I can’t believe you didn’t say anything and say that it was so delicious”. I can’t remember exactly what it was, it was something ridiculous. But I really appreciated it because he was just checking up on me and making sure I was ok. I love him for that.”

5. Out Like A Lamb

Brann Dailor: “I wrote a good chunk of the music for Out Like A Lamb. I have riffs sprinkled into a lot of these songs, me and Bill always kind of go back and forth, but this is one of the ones I brought to him that had three formidable parts ready. And lyrically, this one’s more about my mum than anything else. And these were the first lyrics that I wrote for the record actually.

“Out like a lamb” was a saying that my mum used to say, the month of March is “in like a lion, out like a lamb”. I’ve always liked that saying. It just refers to the weather, like, “okay, we’re still going to have blizzards and it’s still going to be stupid cold all throughout March when a lot of the country is enjoying spring. But don’t worry, at the end of March, the lilacs are going to start to bloom”. Which was seldom the truth, I’ll add. That really didn’t happen until May. But, the saying was the saying. I looked at it like my mum’s life was marred by illness, and all this tragedy and all this pain and suffering, it was really unfair to her. But in her death, she went in her sleep. And it felt like it was this really beautiful gift from the universe to her, like the universe said, “okay, you’re not going to die from this violent fall or this prolonged illness where you had to fight and fight”. I mean, she was always fighting for her life, but that wasn’t the reason why she passed. She just went in her sleep, so at least she got that.

The lyrics are really about when you have someone who is so close to you in your life and they become very ill, it’s so frustrating because you can’t really do anything. And you’ve tried everything like, “I’ll buy you this and I’ll do this and we’ll do that”. But sometimes the body just doesn’t want to cooperate. It’s hard watching somebody be so sick all the time and really frustrated with their situation. If you’ve known anybody that’s had cancer or any kind of illness that goes on for years, it’s so unfair. And it’s just so heartbreaking to watch it unfold because there’s nothing you can really do. You feel like you want to get in there and be like, “well, what can we do here? Let’s make you feel better. I’ll just tap dance and dress like a clown!”.

The lyrics are very much a further examination of my relationship with my mum. In fact, a lot of these lyrics are about that, and also a further examination of my relationship with Brent, as complex as that was as well. It was complex with my mum too. When you lose people who are close to you, you tend to do an autopsy on your relationship with them and go back to the beginning and go, “okay, this, this, this, this happened and this happened”. And you go through all your pictures and your fond memories, of course, but then also difficult ones. It was all happening in tandem with the album, so that’s what a majority of the lyrics are about.”

6. In The Ruins

Brann Dailor: “Some of the riffs were around for a while, and that opening simplistic riff was definitely around for a while. But the other stuff was pretty new. And In The Ruins was another one that was tricky to arrange. We had made some decisions, there’s some hard left turns in this one where it goes from almost very melancholy to Slayer in one second. But the lyrics from Troy are, I think, pretty much about him losing everything in the hurricanes. His whole neighborhood was just destroyed. It’s taken them two years to rebuild, they actually just moved back in a week ago, I think. They were living in a little apartment and stuff, and I think it was driving him insane. His whole family were displaced, so it’s really difficult to go through that. And along with Brent and everything that’s been going on, he’s just like, “god damn”. The poor guy. I feel bad, but he’s back in there so I think it’s okay. I haven’t gotten the actual nitty-gritty from him. I’m like, “ are you good now?”. It’ll probably take a while, but he’s better than he was.”

7. They’re Coming For You

Brann Dailor: “Nick wrote the whole intro for this one. Dracula’s Castle was the working title for this song because we thought the whole intro sounded like Dracula’s Castle. There were actually a lot of working titles on this album that were all very Dracula-based and we had to take them away because we were just being silly. But we felt like whenever you get that pipe organ organ sound in there, and that’s in there a lot, it just makes it sound more Dracula, which was good. We like Dracula. Dracula’s cool! By far the hottest monster. Well, maybe not by far. But myself and Nick wrote the whole rest of the song. And I’m really stoked on that one just because musically it’s a glimpse into what Nick can do and what the future holds a little bit.”

8. Golden Spires

Brann Dailor: “I think this was maybe the second song that we put together for the album and another one that went through many different makeovers and rearrangements of parts. Golden Spires, for me, was just where I wanted to put my mum. I could just imagine these Golden Spires in the sky, and I just wanted her to be up there with the angels. So that was pretty much it. There are big heavy riffs going on, but it also has a really beautiful chorus. And it also has those really kind of creepy bits, João [Nogueira] is playing during the verses, this really creepy, almost like a broken music box type thing. And I like that. There are a lot of cool sounds going on in that one.”

9. Moth And Bone

Brann Dailor: “When we first met Patrik Berger, the producer, when he came to visit us, this was the first thing that we arranged. I think Bill had the initial riff that was sort of an off-time, off-kilter feel that almost sounded like The Police or something. I really like the song just because it doesn’t follow much of a traditional song structure. I like anything that’s weird and takes us out of our usual thing. Sometimes you get stuck in these structure things, you’re like, “no, this has to be A, B, A, B, C”. This one’s cool because the structure’s different and interesting, and it goes to all these cool places. It starts at The Police, dips into some Cure, and then ends up at Slayer again somehow.”

10. A Vampire’s Demeanor

Brann Dailor: “I wrote the two main riffs of this song. And really it just got my head going, I liked the beat to it in my mind, and I felt like it would be perfect for a festival or something like that. I could see a bunch of people jumping up and down and it seemed like fun! I was playing guitar and came up with the riff and I thought it was badass. Sometimes things are just badass!”

11. The Vanishing

Brann Dailor: “The intro to The Vanishing was provided by none other than Geezer Butler. That’s the coolest thing ever for me. This was this weird jam that me and Bill were doing, just him and I in his basement. We jammed on this riff for a while and I didn’t really know if we’re going to do anything with it, but it came up again. We found it, we were looking through some computer files, listening to some stuff that we had done. We kind of took a break from everything, and then when we came back around to listen through what we had demoed previously, we were like, “oh, what was that?”. It just came from us kind of hanging out and we were jamming.

Being so immersed in the Ozzy and the Sabbath thing, I had been listening to nonstop Black Sabbath for months and months and months. I was like, “oh, maybe we could do a Caravan-style vocal on this thing”. And so that worked out. And then we got Geezer on there!

With the lyrics, I really wanted to make it like I was going out into outer space and finding my sister’s constellation and making sure that my mother’s constellation found her constellation and that they were okay. And also, Geezer Butler was my mum’s favourite out of Sabbath because she would say, “he wrote the lyrics, man!”. But she also liked his style, she liked his silver platform boots and his little vest too. I’m so thrilled he’s on there. The song would’ve still been the song, just without a bass intro. And it would’ve been for her as well. But to get Geezer on there, it’s a real “planet’s aligned” type of situation. A cosmic tune. And then Joe [Duplantier] from Gojira helped out at the end there with some big growls and brought it home. I love this one, it’s really special. I’m so excited for people to hear it.”

12. The Three Fates

Brann Dailor: “The Three Fates almost feels like three movements. Lyrically, it talks about the Three Fates and how you don’t really have any control over what’s going to happen to you. I’d also been examining my mum’s life. With some people, it seems like they’re cursed, but it’s this really slow moving curse. I almost called this song The Slowest Curse, but then The Three Fates was more fitting because it was in three parts and I was like, “we’ll put the three fates on the cover. Okay, I’ve tied the bow around this!”.

For my mum, this was a very slow moving curse that took 69 years to unfold, but it had all these different levels to it. And we got Neil Fallon from Clutch to do this little poem that I wrote, this spoken word bit that he does in the middle section that’s psychedelic and really awesome. He totally nailed it. It’s hard to do spoken word and not feel like a total cheese ball, it’s very difficult to pull that off. It’s almost impossible. I wrote this whole thing and I sent it over to him. I was like, “tell me if this is the dumbest thing you’ve ever read. Please be honest with me”. He’s like, “no, I think it’s awesome!”. Neil’s lyrics are amazing, he’s a really great lyricist, and I don’t have any confidence in my lyrics. I was almost embarrassed to send them over to him, but I did. And I was like, “listen, if you think these are dumb, just use them as the inspiration for your lyrics and you write something cooler”. He’s like, “no, I’m using these. These are cool”. I’m like, “okay, fine. We’ll do that then!”

The last part that takes us out in this song and this album is all instrumental, and I love how it goes in this weird fusiony thing that’s got João and Nick, the two new guys, and they have this really beautiful musical conversation together that takes it home into a big, awesome finale.”