Mastodon Drummer Had $800 Phone Bill With Jordison Over Movie

There’s nothing like a good movie to bring people together and for Mastodon drummer Brann Dailor, the 1986 cult classic River’s Edge is something that was at the heart of his longtime friendship with Slipknot’s Joey Jordison. In fact, according to Dailor, he once ran up an $800 phone bill largely due to he and Jordison sharing quotes from the movie back and forth.

According to Dailor, it started when they were touring together and they both spotted a group of police cars parked with their lights on. Jordison then dropped a well known line from the movie, with Dailor responding with the follow-up and the friendship took off from there.

“I got home at the end of that tour and I had a $800 phone bill. My wife at the time said,’Is this because you were texting River’s Edge quotes back and forth with Joey?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah.I’m sorry. But I can’t let I can’t let Joey know. I can’t let him think that I don’t know what the next line is.’ It’d be like 3 in the morning. We’re on different buses. We’re in Germany somewhere and he’s like, ‘Somebody [expletive] parked,’ you know?”

Dailor details the movie’s significance from his youth and adds, “Some of my deepest relationships that I’ve had with people, River’s Edge plays a part. It’s a big movie for me.” So when the opportunity arose on their new album, the drummer says he didn’t hesitate to add some dialogue from Dennis Hopper’s Feck from the movie that exemplified how they feel about their new music.

“‘I feel so [expletive] alive’ is a statement that we also wanna make,” says Dailor. “This is an emotionally powerful record for us, but it’s not a sad record, you know? It’s kind of a united front for us. And it’s a beautiful thing that we’re all still here and still able to do this. We kind of want to kick the doors down with the new album.”

Within Full Metal Jackie’s discussion with Brann and Troy Sanders from Mastodon for her weekend radio show, they dig into the heavy emotional circumstances surrounding their new Marrow Deep album, working through the deaths of former bandmate Brent Hinds as well as Dailor’s mother.

The bandmates also discuss what the additions of Nick Johnston and Joao Nogueira have meant to this new album and Sanders shares a personal favorite moment of recording that showed the true band dynamic. And they discuss the importance of touring and putting together a solid bill top to bottom for people coming out to shows in 2026.

Check out more of the chat below.

It’s Full Metal Jackie and I’m so excited to welcome Brann Dailor and Troy Sanders from Mastodon to the show. We’re here to talk about your amazing new record, Marrow Deep. Sadly, this album deals with a topic that the band is all too familiar with, in death. Not only did Brent Hinds pass, but we also lost Brann’s mother, and both impacted the tone of this record.

So this one’s a little different in that you’re dealing with the death of someone who has been part of your core creative structure for years. In wanting to do this right, how much thought is there given to what would Brent have done here versus putting your own stamp on what the band is now and what is felt in this given situation?

Troy Sanders: Bill, Brann and myself will never deny the magnitude that Brent had in our band from day one. We’ll never deny his legacy and his unbelievably unique talents in songwriting and soul and character. That will never be denied ever, ever, ever.

But with this record, it turned out to be more of a celebration of … I don’t know if celebration’s the right word. A moving forward with a rejuvenated perspective and energy personally, friend-wise and musically. It became what we spoke of as this is gonna be the most important record of our career.

So it was more of a moving forward record once we started digging in, never denying Brent’s power and presence since day one of being in our band. But this record was moving forward, almost celebrating this new perspective and rejuvenated energy that the five of us shared collaborating, creating this record from the demo stages all the way to the final takes of tracking the record.

Mastodon, “In the Ruins”

Brent Hinds was certainly one of the more outrageous characters we’ve had in heavy music. You guys probably knew him better than anyone. What do you feel is mostly misunderstood about Brent or is the memory you’d like to most leave people with about who he was to you?

Brann Dailor: I think one of the most misunderstood things is that he hated heavy metal (laughs). Because he famously said that in an interview and people really took it and ran with it, you know? But I understood what he meant to a degree, because he loved heavy metal.

He loved Neurosis, he loved Judas Priest, Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath,, Metallica. There was lots of metal that he enjoyed. There was certain groups that he just didn’t like. So I think he just kind of misspoke and he liked to do that.

He liked to stir the pot a little bit or a lot bit (laughs). It was kind of a fun thing for him to just throw a wrench into everything. He wasn’t really being serious. He just was having some fun and he liked to piss people off sometimes. That was a. fun thing for him to do. I like to do that, too, sometimes. It’s fun.

But he was wild and crazy, but here was a very loving dude down there. He was very, a sensitive guy that sort of wore his emotions on his sleeve and was always kinda right there and it really translated to his guitar playing. He could access those emotions pretty easily, and he moped through his instrument like probably nobody I’ve ever seen or jammed with.

He just was really could get to the core of you. That’s why so many people were so attracted to his guitar solos because his guitar solos really just struck a chord with a lot of people, me included. I can feel that stuff, you know?

That’s what always kinda made us keep coming back for more. As tumultuous as things would get sometimes with him, we just wanted to see if we could help him to get the music out and concentrate on the music aspect of his life.

He loved nature, he loved the outdoors, he liked animals and he just was a pretty pure soul.

One of the first songs off this album, “Your Ghost Again,” speaks to the presence that Brent still has with this band. Troy,  you in particular have spoken about your lines in the song being about expressing your gratitude. What did it mean to have the song be the first statement to come from the album and how has it helped you cope with his loss?

Troy Sanders: The emotions through this whole album, at least from a lyrical standpoint, speaking for Brann and myself as the lyricists, it went back and forth with every emotion under the sun I believe. But when this part that I took vocally came in, I was just feeling being proud to have shared thousands of stages with him.

He had come into my life seven years prior to Mastodon forming. We had a local Atlanta band called Four Hour Fogger for seven years and he turned me on to a lot of art, a lot of great music, super cool bands, travels. And he impacted my life and opened my eyes for 32 years that I was lucky enough to know him.

So there’s a lot of gratitude to give to him friendship-wise, loving-wise, music-wise, everything. So my vocal part in that particular song was just I was feeling a lot of gratitude to be able to share what we shared.

And what it means to me to, like every other song on the record, is to being through such a heavy, bizarre year and a half or so of creating the record, putting pen to paper helped me get my thoughts through the pen to the paper and into Mastodon. And it was very therapeutic. It helped me understand my own feelings and process everything. And as always, we try to write something that will live forever and be bright and hopefully beautiful in some way, stemming from such sadness and darkness. So it’s very therapeutic for me and it’s very helpful to me personally to write lyrics of heavy subject matter, unfortunately.

Mastodon, “Your Ghost Again”

Guys, because much of this album is rooted in losses that were so personal, it was difficult to openly talk about it for months. How is that for you now going out to promote this material? It’s obviously still really personal, but is there a certain self-preservation through detachment you’re able to get revisiting this in the live setting? And can you speak to what having music as a platform to work through all of these feelings generated by the past year have meant to you?

Troy Sanders: For me, now that we’ve had time to sit on things and speak about things, you kind of put that out there and I’m really proud of my bandmates and this record that we made. I’m very excited about moving forward and playing a lot of shows and connecting with fans all over the world.

To answer your question for the first part of it, it makes me feel good when you can try to be open and honest and you put it out there and then okay, I got that off my chest and now people can hear it if they care to hear that. Now we can move forward and celebrate something that we worked really hard on.

Hopefully people will be moved by it or touched by it. And we get to play a lot of great shows, ’cause that’s the greatest compliment on earth is to be on a stage with these guys and have fans either singing at you, smiling at you, or clapping at the end of the set. And on the calendar we have lots of that coming up. So I’m really excited about getting going in that direction.

Brann Dailor: I think it is a bit of a slog sometimes mentally and emotionally to try to dredge these things up day after day. But it’s something we’re kinda used to at this point.

You do over time figure out ways to try to say the important things without walking away feeling emotionally drained at the end of each day of doing like press and stuff and talking about Brent and talking about my mom and ’cause I went through it with Crack the Skye when I opened up about what had happened with my sister. I didn’t anticipate that part of it, you know? I just was being real when we started writing that material and I didn’t think about the consequences of being so honest and open about something that I didn’t really wanna talk about all the time. In fact, I would intentionally not talk about it because it’s too upsetting.

Then we put Crack the Skye out and I found myself having to talk about it every single day for months. And I was like, “Oh my God, what have I done?”

It’s Full Metal Jackie. Troy and Brann from Mastodon on the show with us. We’re talking about Marrow Deep. And given how deeply this record is tied to the losses you’ve gone through, especially in the past year, talk about what it was like to step into the studio and start making this record so soon after everything happened.

Brann Dailor: I’ve sort of figured out a way to work through it. And so I think we’re all sort of a little bit seasoned veterans in that aspect at this point. Even though it still is a painful thing obviously. But this record unfortunately has served to be a memorial for both of those people. They were two of the closest people in my life and in our lives. And that’s the reason the album’s called Marrow Deep.

We didn’t want this record to be about that. I’d trade all the lyrics and all the riffs to have my people back. But here we are. And we do have this platform and we do have the ability to use music and Mastodon as our own, as corny and as it sounds, it really served as a therapy to get through these tough situations.

We went into the studio to start doing pre-production to record the album maybe six days after Brent had passed. It was a big question mark in my mind. I’m like, “Are we doing the right thing? Should we even go in the studio right now? Should we take a break?” But it turned out to be sort of the opposite.

You can talk about grief. You can talk about it a year later, but a year later is a year later and a year lighter. When it’s just as fresh and it has just happened, it’s heavy. There’s a physical manifestation of grief that comes along with it. And in all honesty, it was hard to get out of bed, ’cause it just weighs so heavy on you. But I knew that my dudes were down at the space. I knew that Joao and Nick were gonna bring a a lighter energy to the group just because they don’t have 25, 30 years of history with this dude. So they’re not gonna have that heaviness the way that we have it.

But it felt like when we got in there, I got myself up out of bed and went down to the studio and once we started jamming and working through it, it was almost like we had to get in the center of the room and put shields over us to form a indestructible beetle.

So to work on this stuff and just really get in the trenches with each other and lean on each other, really to honor Brent and to honor my mom, and then to honor Mastodon and to honor our friendships and celebrate the fact that we are still alive and can play music and can carry on this name and this legacy of this band.

It would be a disservice to do what men like to do and push those feelings down into the pit of your stomach and turn around and walk away. So I feel very lucky and lucky to be alive and happy to be able to play the drums and happy to be able to write music about people who are very important to us.

Relationships are the most important thing in life and I’m happy and lucky to have known somebody as beautiful and complex as Brent and been able to play music with him and to have had such an awesome relationship with my mom, another person who was a musician that was a complex human being that inspired me endlessly to play music and be in this band with my friends.

This album was gonna be a different experience regardless, with Nick coming in for Brent, and João bumped up to a full-fledged member making this now a five-piece. It’s been over two decades with the same core creatively. What are the additions of Nick and João bringing to what the studio experience was like this time around?

Troy Sanders: For me, it was the most energetic studio experience I’ve felt in a long, long time. Because you bring in these two guys who want to be there. They’re fans of the band. They love the band. João’s been touring with us for five years. We just traveled around the world for a year and a half with Nick.

And like Brann said, right after Brent passed, we’re in like 10 days or so, we’re scheduled to start recording a new record. Don’t know if that would’ve happened if the three of us were gonna carry the weight and try to write this record. But we had five people in there bouncing ideas off each other, all with the same aligned vision and desire to get in there and make something really cool and interesting and lean on each other and write riffs and collaborate and make that bridge better and make that intro cooler.

This energy was at a level that it hadn’t been at in quite some albums. So for me, that’s the excitement and this fresh, renewed perspective brought made me feel good. I think we’re onto something cool here, because it’s hard to tell right at the beginning.

But you have five guys, and we’ve been a four-piece 25 years, but now there’s five. And the drive is as passionate as it’s ever been. And it was very refreshing to look around the studio and see this energy.

READ MORE: Mastodon Reflect Upon Releasing First Album Since Brent Hinds’ Death

My favorite moment of the whole five or six weeks in the studio, we were trying to create this bridge for a song which is called “The Three Fates.” In the room there’s a couch with, that can fit three people. It was me, Bill and Brann sitting on the couch in like this tight. And on the floor was Nick sitting Indian style with an acoustic guitar, and João on his hands and knees with his keyboard on the floor.

And the two of them are going back and forth ’cause they have this idea for this bridge, and they’re going back and forth, back and forth for a long time. And I looked over at Brann on my right, Bill to my left on this couch and these guys were picking up this slack and making this really cool bridge that’s one of my favorite moments on the record. And for a half hour we didn’t say a word and these guys were building something really beautiful.

It’s like this is a band, you know? We’re not saying a word right now. We don’t have any input in this part, but these guys are going at it and they created something really big and badass and beautiful.

That’s my favorite moment of recording the whole record, seeing this collaboration as a true five-piece. It warmed my heart and gave me the feeling of this vision, that we’re doing the right thing and this is going to be a good record. I was uncertain at that particular moment. So that’s my favorite moment of the record.

Mastodon, “The Three Fates”

We were just talking about the two newest members.

Brann Dailor: Yeah. Those two guys are really incredible musicians. They’re super schooled. They’re very talented guys. And so we had a lot of the music written before they got involved. But we just wanted to sort of quote, unquote, punch up every single song and every moment of every song, and just make sure to go through it with a fine-toothed comb.

Say, “Okay, could this be better? Is there anything more interesting that could happen here? This is kinda one note that goes along. Like, is there a chord change we could do there that’s more interesting?” And so you have these two other musical minds that are involved and we just went through every single song like that and just made sure that we got it to be as good as we thought that we could get it.

Guys, I have to ask, who amongst you is the River’s Edge fan? I’m hearing Feck, Dennis Hopper, ahead of the second song. What’s the connection?

Brann Dailor: Ok, River’s Edge. Let’s see. When I was maybe 13 or 14, my dad gave me a VHS tape that he had taped and it had River’s Edge and Blue Velvet on it. He gave me that. Then maybe a couple years later or a year and a half later, something like that, me and my best friend Jay Fenniger, we took some acid and had a lot of fun. But we started like watching River’s Edge at the end of each journey. We basically just memorized the whole movie.

River’s Edge, to me, it seemed like me and my friends, like that could happen. And it had Slayer in the soundtrack and just seemed it was a bunch of metalheads but with no future. I’m from Rochester, New York and it was bleak at that moment in time. Life was a little bit bleak, so I really connected with the movie. It just seemed like a bunch of teenage kids, kind of rebellious a little bit, but just kind of floating out there in the wind. It was very similar.

River’s Edge Trailer

So I memorized that whole movie. It’s one of my favorite movies of all time. And when I first met Joey Jordison, when we were on tour with Slipknot and Slayer over in Europe in 2005, I saw this little guy watching us soundcheck, and I had never seen Joey’s actual face before. But I was like, “I think that’s Joey.” Then when we got done soundcheck and I went over to, to him and I was like, “Hey, man.” He’s like, “Hey, dude.” We made very fast friends.

But you could see across the street, like past the buses and the trucks, the loading dock door was open and there was like six cop cars over there with their lights on. And he looked over and he said, “Somebody [expletive] parked.” Now that’s a line from River’s Edge, and I did the I did the next line. know? I said, uh, “Duck down, goddammit. You wanna get yourself caught?” And then he was like, “Oh.” So me and Joey became best friends, like in that moment.

I got home at the end of that tour and I had a $800 phone bill. My wife at the time said,”Is this because you were texting River’s Edge quotes back and forth with Joey?” And I was like, “Yeah.I’m sorry.” “But I can’t let I can’t let Joey know, I can’t let him think that I don’t know what the next line is,” you know? It’d be like 3:00 in the morning. We’re on different buses. We’re in Germany somewhere, and he’s like, “Somebody [expletive] parked,” you know?

Understandable.

Some of my deepest relationships that I’ve had with people, River’s Edge plays a part. It’s a big movie for me. And so that opportunity to maybe have a quote in there. When we first started out, like it was a big thing in the in the ’90s and then into the early 2000s to have like movie quotes before songs, you know? And that kind of has gone away, but I was like, “Man, we need to… If we can bring back one, then just have it be a River’s Edge quote,” so. And have it sort of play into how we feel on this record, you know? “I feel so [expletive] alive” is a statement that we also wanna make.

This is an emotionally powerful record for us, but it’s not a sad record, you know? It’s kind of a united front for us. And it’s a beautiful thing that we’re all still here and still able to do this. We kind of want to kick the doors down with the new album.

We should mention there’s a big Mastodon tour coming up here with Deafheaven and Alcest. How are the shows for you this far in and do you find inspiration in seeing how the opening acts are doing it these days and what they bring to your fans?

Troy Sanders: When a band that plays in front of you is bringing it, it just makes you wanna play better and so it’s inspiring. But more importantly, we always go back and forth for quite a while to put a full bill together because we want anyone that comes to the show to leave satisfied. Not just because of one band, but for the full package because it’s very expensive to come to shows. You drive, you buy T-shirts and you buy water and beer and you park, and you get babysitters. And we’re aware of all that ’cause we go to a lot of shows, too.

So it’s very important, once doors open, that the music that’s playing in the lobby on the speakers we are in, we want that to be good. The first band really brings it. The second band, solid. We try to go out there and do the best we can and we want it to look good, sound great and leave happy.

It’s great to have bands that are great players and solid bands playing in front of us because it just makes you really just up the energy and it’s inspiring.

Thanks to Mastodon’s Brann Dailor and Troy Sanders for the interview. Marrow Deep is out now. You can stay up to date with the band through their website, Facebook, X, Instagram and TikTok platforms. Find out where you can hear Full Metal Jackie’s weekend radio show here.

Below, see how we ranked Mastodon’s albums from worst to best.