High Roadwas the first taste ofMasotodon'snew album‘Once More Around The Sun' and we can’t wait to hear what else these guys have come up with for the new record!Bill Kelliher recently caught up withLoudwire to discuss the new record. Check it out!
Lets talk about first single of the new album, High Road. Its a great track and the chorus has been stuck in my head all day. Do you feel like High Road is a good representation of what fans can expect from Once More Round the Sun?
Yeah, in regards that a lot of the stuff on the new record is very verse / chorus based. A lot of it was built as less is more. Weve done our really complex, mathy and even proggy records, but I think we write our best stuff when we strip it away from there. We focus on clear verses and choruses and add the proggy stuff in salt and pepper it. I feel like weve done that in the past, where something wasnt complicated enough, so lets make it more complicated. Its like, no, lets make the song simpler. It took us a while to sound as good as I feel like it does. Its very clean sounding and with a lot of really catchy verses and choruses going on.
I think theres still a good amount of crunch to it, as well. Once More Round the Sun isnt a concept album, but are there recurring themes throughout?
Yes. Its not a concept record, but there is a theme going on. Once More Round the Sun is loosely based on the life and times of each person in the band during the past year. Each song kind of explains what has happened to each one of us in our personal journeys in life, outside of the band. Struggles and hardships, relationships and big change, almost being kicked out of our homes just things that happen to everybody.
Without going into detail, its kind of about all of those things that have happened to us. Nothing that was too tragic, but there are things that have happened. When you read the lyrics and you listen to what is being said, its really more open to interpretation and how you can do your own game of Mad Libs.
I think Once More Round the Sun features the best clean vocal work you guys have done yet. When it comes to those vocals, how has Mastodon progressed in your mind?
Lately Ive noticed weve been doing lots of warm-ups, listening to vocal takes, taking voice lessons: stuff you need to do to keep your voice in shape. I would never have thought 10 years ago what wed be doing in 2014. Now were taking voice lessons and warming up our vocals cords before a show. Just getting all professional, you know what I mean?
I think us screaming and yelling is kind of a thing of the past.But also, our music back then lends itself to more of that style of screaming because the music was really in that direction. We just kind of wrote in any old fashion, just kind of let it fly, let the st fly. We didnt really know how to write songs, we just kind of threw riffs together and screamed over it and people liked it. I guess we just kind of matured and maybe we lost some fans who liked that about us, but we cant continue to write like that on purpose. Every record to me is a snapshot of the frame of mind our band was in, who we were as people when we wrote those riffs.
I think it gets harder and harder as you get older to keep screaming and screaming and screaming about st, you know? I think the songs we write are getting a little more rock, a little bit of rock going on and little more thought behind the groove. Were constantly evolving and are more about the groove and feel rather than just playing as fast as we can or sounding as complicated as possible. Lets put more of our effort into writing a song that feels like something Zeppelin would do, AC/DC or Black Sabbath. They didnt play as fast or as slow as they could, they just made songs. I think were slowly gravitating towards that in an organic fashion.
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