Mastodon: A Year in the Life of the Sludge Metal Lords

For some, the country of Luxembourg evokes an image of a fairy-tale land where aristocratic Gwyneth Paltrow look-alikes leisurely spend their afternoons indulging in Quetschentaart, a fruit tart made with Damson plums. For Mastodon, the setting conjured up much less pretentious thoughts. On a rainy Sunday off while on tour in Europe’s wealthiest country, when nothing was open, guitarist Bill Kelliher wrote the tritone-laced riffs for “High Road,” the lead single from the band’s sixth release, Once More ’Round the Sun. The song features lyrics like “I have my boot stuck in your mouth. I have you screaming for your last breath. I shoved them both deep inside.”

You might assume that Kelliher was raging pretty damn hard as he cranked out the hellacious, detuned “High Road” riffs, but that wasn’t the case. “You know, when I was writing it, it wasn’t like I was in a bad mood or anything,” he explains. “But it definitely has a melancholy feel. I felt like it had a heavy kind of, angry grit to the low-tuned chug of the riff. When it gets to the chorus, it opens up and draws you in. I knew something special was going to go on there. It’s happier and catchier.”

And catchier it is. “High Road,” like many of the tracks on Once More ’Round the Sun, features a more concise and accessible song structure than Mastodon’s earlier offerings. “We’re getting better at crafting songs,” says Kelliher. “It’s not easy. Even though it sounds like it’s trimmed down and streamlined and all that stuff, to me, it’s harder to write something that makes more sense like that, rather than just throw in a bunch of riffs in a row and scream over it.”

A few days after Mastodon’s performance at Bonnaroo 2014, Premier Guitar caught up with Kelliher and lead guitarist Brent Hinds to discuss the making of Once More ’Round the Sun and talk gear.

Prior to The Hunter, your albums had concepts behind them. Was there a concept behind Once More ’Round the Sun?
Kelliher: It doesn’t really have a concept, per se. Not that we gave up on concepts but we’re just going in a different direction, I guess. We’ve done concept albums, which are really cool, and really serious. The Hunter was kind of more laid back and we were feeling like, “Let’s just write a record for the sake of making some music and not have to have anything attached to it, like a concept and all the visuals, and all the stuff that goes with it.” I think this record was just a continuation of that.

While there might not be a concept per se, it seems like there is a theme that runs throughout the album. What does the album title refer to?
Kelliher: It’s loosely based on real events that happened. Once more ’round the sun, which is a full revolution of the earth around the sun, and all of the things that happened within that year. It’s based on things that happened in our personal lives, whether they were tragedies or good things. It’s based on the feeling of what we were all going through.

Did everyone in the band get his story told?
Kelliher: Everybody knows everybody’s business in our band. The four of us know what kind of things went down but people on the outside don’t really know. It’s all wrapped up into the lyrics and all got put in there in some way or another. That was the driving force.

The songs on Once More ’Round the Sunhave simpler verse/chorus structures than some of your earlier outings.
Hinds: Yeah, simpler. You hit the nail on the head. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Kelliher: I had a lot of riffs and songs that I personally wanted to get out. Brann [Dailor, drummer] and I would go down to the practice space and spend months writing and arranging. I would come up with the riffs and he’d say, “Okay, let’s really look at what this song’s about. What’s the main riff? What’s the verse? What’s the chorus here? What makes sense?” We really made a conscious effort to do that.

Is this a big departure from how you’ve written in the past?
Kelliher: We never really used to do that. We just wrote a bunch of songs and riffs and put them in a row and kind of screamed over it. We didn’t worry too much about, “Where’s the chorus? Where’s the hooky part? What part is what?” We slowly did, over time, and Blood Mountain started it. Then, I guess on Leviathan, you started to notice things like, “This is kind of a chorus part here, and this is a verse and whatnot.”

Brent Hinds gets nasty on his Flying V while playing Detroit’s Fillmore while on tour in 2011 supporting The Hunter. Photo by Ken Settle

Having very successfully written both complex and simpler songs, what are the key ingredients to writing a good song?
Kelliher: Well, a song’s really gotta have a good melody and a good meaty hook. It has to be something that grabs you, something that you want to hear again. You listen to music because you like the way it sounds, you know? You hear a riff and you like it, and you want to hear it again. Sing-along parts are great. I love early Weezer records, and the Beach Boys, and the Beatles. It’s all about melody and harmony, to me, and obviously about the riff, having some kind of massive, chugga-chugga riff going on.

How do you guys come up with the two-guitar parts?
Hinds: Bill does all that stuff. I’m not trying to go to Bill to get him to play guitar exactly on point with me ever, really. A lot of times Bill will come to me and say, “Hey, can you play this guitar solo that I wrote with me,” and I’m like, “Okay, cool. No problem.”

Kelliher: Brann and I collaborated on a lot of the stuff, but most of the riffs are mine. I wrote a lot of music on this record, for sure. When Brent writes a song, he’ll play a lot of open notes and I don’t always lock up with what he’s playing. To me the part doesn’t call for two guitars doing the exact same thing. I think that we have to complement each other. He and I are completely different players. He has a style that is very chicken pickin’, and has a lot of open, dissonant notes and chords, which is where we kind of mesh. When I show him stuff, he tries to complement it by writing something different over it. We’re two different players and that’s what makes Mastodon, Mastodon.

Let’s talk gear. The opening of “High Road” has a really meaty guitar sound. What did you use there?
Kelliher: I recently purchased a Friedman BE100 that Friedman’s buddy Rob made for me. I just absolutely love it. It’s such a modern answer to a good cross between metal and rock, with a really warm tone. I used it on almost everything because it just sounded so fuckin’ good. I was like, “Man, this amp just kills it.” I used that for all the distorted stuff. I think we were also running an old Orange—either a bass head or a guitar head—that, by itself, sounded pretty crappy. But somehow Nick [Raskulinecz,producer] had a lot of bass tonality going on there, and it really brought out the sound when you mixed the two together. On its own, when I played through it, I was like, “This does not sound good. I don’t know where you’re going with this.” He was like, “Trust me, it’s going to sound great.”

Hinds: I use old Marshall amps. JMP Mk2 100-watt Lead series—’76 and ’77, around that era.

How about cabs?
Kelliher: I used mostly the Friedman 4x12s with 65-watt Celestion Creamback speakers, which are my personal favorite at the moment. They sound great.

A lot of your songs feature ringing open strings as a texture. How do you set your gear so that the notes ring out crisp, yet still sound warm and blend well with two guitars?
Hinds: It’s just years of practice, I guess. I don’t really know.

Kelliher: I grew up playing metal, and had a cheap guitar, cheap amp, and cheap pickups. I could get that metal tone because I’d always scoop out the mids. Take all the mids away and then you’d have this chug-chug-chug, super trebly, super bassy ’80s metal sound, you know? After playing with various rock guys, I learned to not be afraid to turn the mids up because the mids is where the actual presence of your guitar sound is. You scoop the mids a little, but I tend to believe that a lot of people scoop it too much and you get that false sense of a heavy, bassy, chuggy metal guitar sound, but you lose the presence of where the guitar actually sits. You can’t take away the mids. You have to have a good EQ of all that stuff in there.

So what does your EQ curve look like? Is it less pronounced of a V-shape or are the mids peaking?
Kelliher: Well, if you’re going to look at it, I have my bass frequencies at probably 75 or 80 percent, the mids up about 55, and the highs at about 55.

Is all your gain from the amp or are you using dirt pedals, too?
Kelliher: I just use the amp distortion. I mean I like pedals and have hundreds of distortion pedals that I use in different ways, but for this record I basically plugged straight into the Friedman. The less things in the way….