The Mastodon drummer says a single line from the 1986 film started his friendship with the Slipknot drummer, and it has now ended up on Mastodon‘s new album.
Brann Dailor met Joey Jordison at a soundcheck in Europe in 2005. The friendship was made about a minute later, over a film neither of them mentioned by name.
The Mastodon drummer told Full Metal Jackie that he spotted Jordison watching the band soundcheck on a tour with Slipknot and Slayer, went over and introduced himself. Through the open loading dock door across the street, past the buses and trucks, they could see half a dozen police cars parked with their lights on.
“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,” he said (via Loudwire).
The two drummers spent the rest of the tour firing lines from the film at each other across international borders, on separate buses, at hours that did the damage.
He continued: “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?”
Jordison died in July 2021 at the age of 46.
“River’s Edge“, released in 1986 and directed by Tim Hunter, follows a group of teenagers who fail to report a killing among their own circle. Dennis Hopper plays Feck. Dailor first saw it on a tape his father recorded, which also carried David Lynch‘s “Blue Velvet“, another 1986 film with Hopper in it.
He said: “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.”
The setting was part of it. “‘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.”
A line of Hopper‘s dialogue now sits ahead of the second song on Marrow Deep. Dailor said he wanted to revive a practice that had largely disappeared, and that the line chosen says what the band wanted to say about the album.
He explained: “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,” Dailor added.
Mastodon released Marrow Deep, their ninth album, on August 28 through Loma Vista Recordings, with Patrik Berger and Kurt Ballou producing. It is the band’s first record without founding guitarist Brent Hinds, who left in early 2025 and died in a motorcycle accident that August, and the first made during a period in which Dailor also lost his mother.
It is also the first Mastodon album recorded as a five-piece, with guitarist Nick Johnston and keyboardist João Nogueira joining Dailor, Troy Sanders and Bill Kelliher as full members.
To mark the release, Mastodon head out on “The Poisonous Weapons Tour“, a 27-date coast-to-coast run with Deafheaven and Alcest in tow. The trek opens September 16 in Orlando and works its way across the country before wrapping October 24 at Sick New World in Dallas.
