"When I get home, it only takes like three or four days, then all of the sudden, riffs just start flying through there," says Mastodon drummer and co-vocalist Brann Dailor in the second installment of the Georgia group's The Making of Crack the Skye documentary. The decade-old footage shows the band in the midst of writing, rehearsing and recording the groundbreaking 2009 record, an effort that took the quartet "around a year" of Monday-through-Friday practices with few breaks for shows and no day jobs to distract them. Such an extended absence from the road was "pretty rare," according to Dailor, but it paid creative dividends.
"That's one of the greatest jobs to have," admits a baby-faced guitarist Bill Kelliher in the segment. "I'm not complaining about it." A quick look around the band's relatively small practice space shows wall-to-wall art, ranging from paintings and banners to props from their videos, including one of the fish-people from the video for 2006 cut "Seabeast."
Vocalist and lead guitarist Brent Hinds tells the camera, "We're so prepared to do this album that it's ridiculous ... getting this shit right before [we] go waste anyone's time — especially ours — you know what I mean? No one's paying for it except [points to self] this guy." Check out the full five-minute clip above and watch Mastodon's previous entry in this series here.
