‘DON WI TH THE SHOW (clockwise from left): Hinds works the crowd; the band try an Abbey Road imitation; Kelliher lets ‘er rip; Sanders with dad Barry, mom Jody, brother Kyle; Dailor limbers up backstage

fucking bullshit balls, getting drunk all the time, banging chicks on the bus, after a while it would get on my nerves. But if I ever do that shit, I do it behind closed doors when I’m not around them.”

The vertigo laid him up for months, which he spent largely on his couch, smoking pot in his boxer shorts with an acoustic guitar. Meanwhile, Sanders, Kelliher, and Dailor holed up in their practice space.

“Brent needed time to literally get his head in the right place,” says Sanders. “But if the three of us just sat home, it’d feel stagnant and depressing. So until he recovered, we needed to stay busy.”

The music coming from that period was, in Sanders’ words, “extremely heavy” and

“incredibly aggressive.” But when Hinds was well enough to rejoin his comrades, he brought with him mellower songs he’d conceived in his vertigo-and-pot-addled haze that had what he called “a classic-rock vibe.” Mastodon are a band with no clear leader: Everyone writes

music and lyrics, and everyone except Kelliher has taken a turn on lead vocals—so anyone’s ideas are worth a try. For a while, they worked on both sets of material, but as Dailor explains, “The two camps weren’t really mixing together. And I felt what Brent was doing more than the fast, crazy stuff we’d been working on. I was in the mood to do something slower and bigger.”

Sanders and Kelliher agreed, and when the band began interviewing producers, Hinds says they brought the two batches of music to fellow Atlantan Brendan O’Brien, who has helmed albums by Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, and Bruce Springsteen. Perhaps not surprisingly,

he favored Hinds’ approach. As it was, Dailor, who had always been the primary architect of the fantastical concepts behind Mastodon’s albums and who, in recent years, had taken a more assertive role in writing lyrics, was inspired by Hinds’ tunes to dig deeper into his own life for the songs on Crack the Skye.

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Although it’s held together by a typically wild story line that encompasses Stephen Hawking, outer space, time travel, wormholes, Rasputin, and an outlawed Russian religious sect known as Khlysty, at its core the album is a tribute to Dailor’s younger sister, Skye, who committed suicide when she was 14 and he was 15. Hinds had been encouraging Dailor for years to tackle the subject, and with the new music, Dailor felt it was the right time to at least partially unload the psychic burden.

“When you’re dealing with a suicide, there’s a lot of guilt that goes along with it,” Dailor says. “I was supposed to be home at 11:00; I was at some crazy drug house; I stayed out all night. They had to find me and tell me she was dead. Telling the story was my chance to save her, to put her on my back and carry her home to safety.”

In this light, the soaring title track’s hoarse shouts of “Mama, don’t let them take her / Don’t let them take her down” take on a poignant cast. Those lyrics and vocals are actually the handiwork of Scott Kelly, guitarist-vocalist for psych-metal

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