Mastodon’s Troy Sanders sat down with Heavy Consequence for a new interview. In the chat, he revealed that the band played their landmark album ‘Leviathan’ to a crowd not just once before the release of it. He explained:
“We had put out ‘Lifesblood’ [in 2001] on Relapse and then ‘Remission’ [in 2002], and we have just toured basements and VHF halls and boat sheds and, you know, we lived by BookYourOwnLife.com. Our friends in Clutch invited us to open for them in 2003, and we decided that we were an unknown band and we had all this new material for a new record which was going to be ‘Leviathan.’
Before the release of the album, the rockers played it live not just for one or two shows — but for an entire month:
“So we played Leviathan pretty much start to finish opening for Clutch for an entire month. The tour was East Coast all the way through the US, and wound up in Seattle where we recorded ‘Leviathan’ with Matt Balis at Litho Studios. So we rehearsed ‘Leviathan’ in front of a crowd that had never heard any of those songs ever, in the time where no one had a phone recording all the stuff – all your new stuff, not that it would meant much to us at the time, anyway.”
How Playing ‘Leviathan’ For A Month Paid Off
One month of playing the same album nonstop paid off. Mastodon didn’t just prepare themselves to record the album, but a month later, they got the offer for the tour of their lives. Sanders explained:
“But we were a relatively unknown band playing a whole record of unfamiliar material to an entire run opening for Clutch, for thousands of people collectively. We got to Seattle and sure enough, we were pretty damn well rehearsed on the material. We recorded ‘Leviathan’ and it came out… you know, we really stretched ourselves doing the Moby Dick story, and thankfully it worked out well because a month later we were on tour with Lamb Of God and Slayer.”
Mastodon’s most recent joint tour with Lamb Of God under the name ‘Ashes of Leviathan’ kicked off on July 19. The two bands will be playing their hit albums, ‘Ashes of the Wake’ and ‘Leviathan’ in full to celebrate the 20th anniversary of both albums.
You can watch the interview down below.