How did the impact of the songs change when given that additional room to breathe? I hope that the honesty that we put forth and the emotion that we sink into the music can help somebody who is going through a tough time. It was awful to watch him deteriorate and the way that we deal with all that kind of stuff is to put it in the music. For this record, we lost our dear friend and manager, Nick John, to pancreatic cancer and going through that was difficult.

I'm really first and foremost just trying to understand any kind of tragic situation that has transpired with us. I'm not sure that I really think about any kind of responsibility other than I hope it helps. If something has happened tragic in my life, there's always been drums and music that get me through it, whether it's listening to music or playing music. I've always had drums or something to turn to in a time of need. I hope it is, but I've never really lived without it so I don't really know what the other side of that looks like. I don't even know that that it is cathartic. If music is cathartic, what therapeutic responsibility do you feel toward someone who listens to your albums? Mastodon music is often reactionary to loss and grief. When those things all come together, what you have is just sort of that raw emotion that gets captured and that can be sort of a spiritual thing for a lot of people. We don't sit around and talk about our feelings so much as we play the feelings, so that's really how we're able to express ourselves as humans and able to understand some of the not so fun moments of our lives. It just sort of manifests itself in that way and, especially for all of us, it's our way to connect with other people and a way for us to connect with each other through our instruments. There's some kind of a power that kind of lies within music and sound that's almost intangible.

Why is music so conducive to conveying those themes?

Spirituality is very apparent in much of Mastodon's work and even more so now with this new record. Dailor also talked about a different creative muse as he drew pictures of clowns for 101 consecutive days, which have been compiled into a book.

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