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For anyone who has looked at the title of Mastodon's latest CD and gone "Why is the word 'sky' spelled with an 'e' on the end?", you obviously don't know the true meaning behind the album. It's a tragic and heartbreaking story, but it's one that needed to be told.
Skye Dailor was the little sister of Mastodon's drummer and lyricist Brann Dailor. The siblings were only nine months apart in age and were extrememly close to one another. They looked to each other for support due to the fact they were being brought up in an unstable household filled with drugs and abuse. Their mother was sick most of the time with arthritis and was also a heavy drug addict. Their step-father was controlling and abusive to everyone else in the family. Given the aweful flaws of their parents, the Dailor children bonded together to survive through the emotional and physical pain they endured every single day.
Then in 1990, when they were both teenagers, Skye was being bullied by a gang of bad kids. Acting on impulse, she ran home and swallowed a bunch of pills from her mother's dresser. She died instantly. Brann had been tripping on acid at a friend's house at the time, and another friend had to tell him that his own sister was dead. As he told Rolling Stone in a recent interview, "I let out this giant scream, my knees buckled, and I fell down. So that's the crack in the sky. It's for that moment you find out someone close to you is gone."
Two weeks after her death, Brann got high and went to his sister's grave and started digging. He couldn't acknowledge that she was dead and wanted to bring her back. If nothing else, he wanted to open the casket just to see her face one last time. About halfway through, he stopped and just lied there in the dirt, staring up at the stars. That's when a sort of miracle happened - according to his own accounts, he swears that he saw his sister's face in the stars. She told him not to worry anymore because she was in a better place. Afterwards, he ran home only to find that his abusive step-father had bailed on the family. His mother was doubled over on the bed and crying, and he layed down beside her in what seemed like a night of endless tears.
Eventually, the drug use between mother and son became even worse and both were admitted to a mental institution. Drug addiction followed Brann through his twenties and right up until the early days of Mastodon, until his wife (Tiger! Tiger! singer/bassist Suzanne Gibboney) helped him to clean up his act. He became a Christian and kicked most of his habits to the curb, and he became known as one of the world's best drummers through the success that Mastodon began to gain. However, there was still a lot of unaddressed feelings that had been stuffed down for years. After bandmate Brent Hinds' nearly fatal fight at the 2007 VMA's, something inside of Brann kept telling him to write about what happened to his sister. Hence Crack the Skye was born.
While the album has this big elaborate concept about a paraplegic boy who travels back in time and embodies Rasputin, the real meaning behind the songs is quite plain after reading about Brann's horrible childhood and the loss of his sister. For example, take their new single "Oblivion". It's no surprise that this is the first Mastodon song that Brann has sung lead on - it's highly personal. The lyrics directly deal with Brann feeling like he failed Skye because he wasn't there to stop her from killing herself. One stanza that Brann sings reads:
"I tried to burrow a hole into the ground
Breaking all the fingers and the nails from my hand
The eyes of a child see no wrong
Ignorant bliss, impending doom"
After reading about the graveyard incident, those lyrics make perfect sense. The line "I see your face in constellations" in "The Czar" also comes into context. The most intimate and heart-felt song on the album is the title track, which may be one of the all-time saddest songs ever written:
"Momma, don't let them take her
Don't let them take her down
Please tell Lucifer he can't have this one
Her spirit's too strong"
Recently, Brann admitted to Metal Hammer that he thought that writing about Skye would help him put an end to the grief, but instead it just opened up old wounds in the form of song - songs that are played every night in front of thousands of people, one might add. Despite how hard it has been to tell the whole world about what has happened to him, Brann has no regrets. "I'm going to keep writing about this until all of the pain is gone", he told Inked Magazine not long ago. He added in the Metal Hammer interview, "I wanted to lift her up and put her name out there forever...The whole story is my metaphor for if I'd been able to come in and pick her up and save her from that situation".
"Please, please take my hand
Please take my soul to rest
So we can always be around"
- Mastodon, "The Last Baron"
The story of Skye Dailor quickly blew up all over the internet after recent Mastodon interviews. In fact, it's so talked about that if you type in "Brann Dailor" into google search, the first suggestion that pops up isn't "Mastodon" or "drums", it's "sister". Over 4,500 stories relating to Skye's death have been written to date - a number that is simply staggering. Millions of teenagers worldwide commit suicide every year, so in a sense the death of Brann's sister has become more than just a family tragedy, it's become a symbolic source of comfort for countless fans who have gone through similar experiences. "Oblivion" is now a Top 40 hit on Billboard's Active Rock Chart and it has become Mastodon's most widely searched song on various music sharing sites.
So if you didn't know who Skye Dailor was before reading this article, now you know. Brann doesn't typically like for his sister to be brought up by people (one radio interview almost turned ugly when an interviewer tried to probe him about it), but if you ever get the chance to meet him, just let him know that you think he's a truely good guy for having the courage to talk about this openly with the world. He'd appreciate it. As mentioned in another interview, "If something I wrote can keep that 14-year-old girl out there from hurting herself, then I'm doing something right".
(Left) Brann's Sacred Heart and Virgin Mary tattoos in dedication to his late sister. "They're surrounded by yellow roses because she always loved those" he said.
(Right) Skye's picture can be seen in through a tunnel lithograph in the deluxe edition of Crack the Skye.
SOURCES:
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/27183099/mastodon_unleash_the_beast_within
http://www.metalhammer.co.uk/news/mastodons-dailor-discusses-sisters-suicide/
http://www.revolvermag-digital.com/revolver/200905/
Google.com
Inked.com
