THE IT CROWD

When lockdown reached Atlanta, Mastodon’s Brann Dailor did what any sensible musician would do: he started drawing clowns. It would become the most unlikely of saviours

Brann Dailor is drawing his Dalmatian, Thriller, wearing a hat with a clown on it. It’s the final addition to a series of clown pictures he’s been creating while on lockdown, one per day, at home in Atlanta. He thought he’d finished yesterday, when he reached the magic number of 100. But then, he had an idea. He has a pet Dalmatian. There were 101 Dalmatians. He would ‘clown’ his dog. Thriller, and his visual representation, are less than impressed.

“He basically looks humiliated. Like any animal, when you dress them up!” laughs Brann, describing the scene to us down the phone line. “But yeah, I thought yesterday was going to be my last one, and I did a finish-line clown that has his hands up in the air, and he’s just coming through that tape, and in the middle it says ‘I love you,’ because I’ve been sending them out to lots of people.”

The clowns on these pages might appear fanciful, but they’ve also been a great source of comfort to Brann during these uncertain times. There are sad clowns, happy clowns, occult clowns, satirical clowns and popculture-influenced clowns. No matter what his mood, there’s a clown. The routine of depicting one each day has helped him get out of bed and given him a sense of purpose.

“If there’s any kind of silver lining to the horribleness that is this pandemic, it’s given me the opportunity to slow down, you know? For some reason, my brain has been like, ‘Go go go go go go’ every day, for Mastodon, for 20 years. To be able to shut it off has been pretty awesome, to be honest. And to change focus for a minute, even if I’m not really that great of an artist. It’s this meditation that’s been important to my mental health throughout this experience. Everyone is dealing with it in their own way, but for me it was imperative that I sit down and do this. I draw these two clowns hugging, like, ‘I needed that’, you know what I mean?”

Brann’s love affair with clowns began when he was a child. His grandfather was a ‘Shriner’, a type of Mason involved in fundraising activities, and would take young Brann behind the scenes at the charity Shrine Circus.

“We went backstage, and I got to meet some clowns that were mid-makeup,” he recalls. “They looked wild. It evoked some sort of happiness for me, instead of the other side of it, which is a lot of people that are afraid of it.”

In adulthood, these fond memories have manifested themselves in his ‘clown room’ (covered in a previous issue of Metal Hammer). The walls shout with pink and orange stripes, a clown chandelier reaches down, and there’s “a very meticulous grouping of clown paintings”, including one of ‘hobo clown’ Emmett Kelly and the 60s/70s Ringling Bros. clown Lou Jacobs. On the bed lies the clown from

“I LIKE TOUCHING A NERVE WITH PEOPLE”

BRANN DAILOR

horror movie Poltergeist. Brann’s aware that his facepainted paradise is another person’s idea of Hell.

“I enjoy the fact it touches a nerve with people. There’s a part of me that likes to push that boundary a little bit with people, like I know that they’re frightened, but I pretend like I don’t know? And then I show them some clowns and they are deathly afraid, and that makes me happy somehow, because it’s not a real fear. Nothing’s gonna happen. There has only been maybe one instance of a clown murdering little kids, and that’s John

Wayne Gacy.” He stops, then sings, to the Bon Jovi melody: ‘He gives clowns, a bad name.’”

B“MY CLOWNS HELPED ME GET THROUGH THIS”

BRANN DAILOR

rann had long been thinking about getting back into drawing. When he was a kid, he would decorate his and his friends’ school books with Eddie from Iron Maiden, and his parents were convinced he’d have a career in visual art. Somewhere in his late teens, he lost enthusiasm, but for the last couple of decades he’s been sporadically buying supplies and stockpiling them in his closets, along with the paints his mum would send him for Christmas. On the day the stayat-home orders came into effect in Atlanta, he opened his sketchbook and drew a clown. He decided to do

14 – one for each day of the two-week period that officials said would flatten the curve. Little did he know he’d still be drawing months later.

The first few were simply faces, and then he started bringing in themes, with each image taking between two and seven hours to complete. It was initially an uphill battle, as he struggled with the “defeatist attitude” that he wasn’t good enough – something that also manifests when he’s songwriting. He pushed on and became stronger for it, even batting away critiques from, of all people, his mum.

“I was like, ‘Mom, I don’t care at all.’ And it’s nothing against her, but it’s also given me a new perspective on how I don’t care about what anyone thinks about them. I need to implement that in my music as well. I need to stop caring so much about what people think,” he confesses. “I’ve never cared so much about what people think about Mastodon music, or any kind of music I create, or my drumming, or my singing, or my lyrics, or anything enough to alter it in any way. But it does hurt when someone doesn’t like it and they’re vocal about it. I don’t want to feel like that anymore, and this has really helped me.”

When his friends heard about his project, they told other friends, and he ended up sending a clown a day to some of the biggest names in metal: Lars Ulrich, Josh Homme, Joey Jordison, Joe and Mario Duplantier, Jamey Jasta, John Baizley, Scott Kelly, Neil Fallon, Chino Moreno and more. They would suggest ideas, or tell him if the images had made them emotional – a tiny clown surrounded by empty space was a particular tear-jerker.

“Everybody’s fragile, and feeling kind of sad,” he says. “Sometimes the clowns would pick them up, and sometimes the clowns would remind them of how special human relationships are and how much they miss everybody.”

After Brann finishes his Thriller masterpiece, he’s going to drive his truck over to Mastodon’s practice space and reconnect with his band. They have already recorded a new song for upcoming movie Bill & Ted Face The Music (“It’s a crazy rocker! Ha ha ha!”), and now they’re writing the follow-up to 2017’s Emperor Of Sand. The way Brann describes it, it’s sounding… very Mastodon.

“It’s always dangerous to tell someone what something sounds like,

’cause if you go, ‘It’s really heavy’, they go, ‘Oh yeah, it’s gonna be like [2003 album] Remission’, and you’re like,

‘Well I don’t know.’ It’s all over the map. There’s some big, big heavy riffs that are happening, so that’s what I’m into. And then there’s some guitar gymnastics, by Brent [Hinds], that have been some of the most difficult things I’ve tried to wrap my ahead around and play drums to. So there’s some super-progginess coming from him, and some really super, pretty moments. But there’s some rockers in there, too – there’s some heavy, fast stuff as well. But a lot of it is kind of doomy. But that’s where we’re at!”

The accomplished, moving Emperor Of Sand reflected on mortality, and their eighth album looks set to do the same. Mastodon have been through some more tough times, not least losing their much-loved manager, Nick John, to pancreatic cancer in 2018.

“A lot of it is just really fucking sad,” says Brann. “We lost our manager, and there’s been a lot of big feelings that go along with that, because he was also our best friend. So I think that that’s what this album is sort of about. I said this at his funeral – it’s not yet fully apparent how much we are going to miss him. Yeah we can look back on the good times, but the thing about his passing that’s manifesting in the music is that sadness aspect of it. You’ll be able to hear that. It translates to me, anyways, when I listen to it. And I listen to the lyrics, especially. They make me upset. But I think it’s OK to be upset.

It’s OK to be sad sometimes.”

Brann will work until 5 or 6pm today and then head home, throw a tuna steak on the grill, have a beer and watch a movie. He’ll go to bed and then get up tomorrow, but he doesn’t know what’ll happen after that, because there aren’t any more clowns to create. It’s been a strange few months, but Brann assures us he’s going to be OK. We ask him to choose a favourite clown artwork, but he can’t.

“I like that there’s so many of them and I like to see them all together,” he says. “It’s this journey of this pandemic and how scary it’s been, and how sad it’s made everybody, and my clowns helped me get through it. And the progression of them, every single day, for 101 days straight, through the thickness of this bizarre time period. It’s been really therapeutic and I needed it.”

MASTODON’S LATEST ALBUM, EMPEROR OF SAND, IS OUT NOW VIA REPRISE. A NEW ONE IS EXPECTED NEXT YEAR

THRILLER “I haven’t drawn a dog before. One of the things about these clown drawings is that I don’t really know how to draw very well, but I’m teaching myself over time.”

FINISH LINE CLOWN “There’s lots of people on my list to receive a daily clown, and I think it’s helped some people. They’ve told me that it’s something they look forward to every day, and when I told them I was stopping they were like, ‘Noooo!’”

NUMBER OF THE BEAST “I thought it would be funny to have Eddie and the Devil as two clowns, and I really wanted to draw that again, to see if I could do it better than I did it when I was 13! I have a Number Of The Beast carnival mirror in my music listening room.” BAPHOMET “I thought, ‘Can I clown Baphomet?’ It’s kind of for Brent [Hinds, guitars]. Brent loves anything with Baphomet on it; he’s got a big Baphomet tattoo on his back.”

SILENCE OF THE LAMBS “It’s the death’s-head moth. That’s one of my favourite movies. It just popped into my head: ‘I wonder if that would look cool to do a clown in the middle?’. I got halfway through sketching it and was like, ‘Oh, this is going to be awesome.”

CASKET CLOWN “I think ever since my sister passed away when I was young, and I went to a bunch of funerals that summer, it’s just in there now, do you know what I mean? I’m not sure if it’s morbid curiosity, or what you would call it. I also have some post-mortem photography from the 1800s.”

CLOWN CAR “It’s a Volkswagen Beetle clown car. Traditionally, the joke with clown cars is that a million clowns will come out. I thought it would be funny to put some signage on the car about social distance guidelines.”

DEATH HOLDING A POODLE “Clowns and poodles have been a running theme for a long time. You’ll go to the circus, and there’ll be a clown, and he’ll be with a poodle. I have no idea why, but I had this image of death with some goofy-ass clown face, and the poodle has an invitation to die.”

TINY CLOWN “He has a balloon that he was floating up and it says, ‘I miss you’ on it. People were like, ‘Oh my god, I’m in tears from that clown. What’s wrong with me?’”

ICE CREAM CONE CLOWN “Everyone who saw that was like, ‘Ohhhh, nooo!” And a lot of people were like, ‘That’s how I feel today. I’m that ice cream cone.’ Because people are fragile!”

JAWS “It was Memorial Day here in the States, and Memorial Day ties in with Jaws, because they decided to leave the beaches open during the pandemic and there were people crowding them. Because they opened too early, you’re seeing all these spikes here, especially in Florida.”