There are records you admire, records you associate with a time in your life, records you call favourites because some combination of musicianship and memory has granted them a permanent place in you. And then there are records that seem to have entered your life with such improbable precision that eventually it becomes difficult to separate the work from the person you became while listening to it.
For me, Blood Mountain is the latter. It is my favourite album of all time, by my favourite band of all time. Twenty years after its release on 12 September 2006, that sentence feels less like an opinion than an acknowledgment of geography. This record is somewhere I have lived. I know its paths, creatures, temperature changes, sudden clearings and hostile elevations. Whenever a genuine trial has entered my life, sooner or later I have found myself climbing it again. That is happening now. I find myself in an unprecedented personal trial, and almost instinctively I have returned to Blood Mountain. This has happened enough times that I recognise the pattern. The album represents something I apparently need to be reminded of periodically: trial, transformation, triumph. Three points describe the cycle. Trial initiates movement; transformation is what happens in the crossing; triumph is the emergence on the other side. And because no triumph is permanent, the circle turns again. Another trial comes. Another self enters it. Twenty years later, that idea feels considerably different from the way it did when I first heard Mastodon. And the strangest part is that my history with it begins before I knew the band existed.
1996, 2006
The passage of time occasionally reveals itself through absurd mathematics. I have been thinking lately about the fact that 1996 and 2006 are only ten years apart. That statement feels wrong to me. 1996 belongs to childhood mythology. It is the era in which I remember becoming conscious that Star Wars was going to return. George Lucas had begun writing Episode I in November 1994, and by September 1996 the coming prequels were sufficiently real that reports were circulating about studios competing for the films and sets being constructed outside London. I remember that atmosphere: the feeling that something enormous and mythological was approaching from beyond the horizon. Through Star Wars, Joseph Campbell eventually became one of the intellectual pillars of my life. Campbell’s conception of the monomyth gave language to something I had felt in stories long before I could articulate it: departure, threshold, ordeal, transformation, return. The hero does not simply defeat something. The hero enters a domain in which the previous self is insufficient. Ten years after 1996, Mastodon released an album built around essentially that proposition. This connection is not something fans have merely projected onto Blood Mountain after the fact. Troy Sanders has subsequently spoken explicitly about The Hero with a Thousand Faces being central to the record, and the opening of “The Wolf Is Loose” directly deploys Campbellian terminology. In a 2007 interview, the interviewer even began by pointing to its references to the belly of the whale and refusal of return. Sanders answered by describing Blood Mountain as simultaneously fantasy and metaphor: the group’s own struggle, sacrifice, career, new relationship with Warner Bros. and the climb into an uncertain future. The fantasy was never an escape from reality. It was a machine for understanding it. That is precisely what it became for me.
December 2006
I joined the Army in December 2006. At almost exactly that moment, Blood Mountain was three months old. Mastodon had begun its supporting tour even before the album appeared, on 6 September, and spent that autumn taking the new songs across America and then Europe. They supported Tool in Europe in November and were preparing to remain on the road through much of 2007. So while Mastodon were beginning the real-world climb that their fictional mountain represented, I was beginning one of my own. I had been through an acute period of anorexia and obsessive-compulsive disorder. My compulsions could become extraordinarily restrictive; entering a room could mean having to touch all four corners of it. My world had contracted. I had also internalised an interpretation of myself that, looking back, was brutal. I believed I had become an inconvenience to my parents, something difficult they had to manage. I thought of myself as a beast. I don’t regard that as an objective description of who I was now. It was the moral language I had imposed upon illness. Instead of asking whether I was frightened, overwhelmed or unwell, I had converted suffering into a character defect and decided that the solution was transformation. So I shaved my head and joined the Army. I was going to evolve. That word matters here. I wanted to cross a threshold from child to adult, weakness to strength, chaos to discipline. In the mythology I would later discover inside Blood Mountain, I was trying to reach my own crystal skull. Mastodon’s version of that object is magnificently strange. In the Making of Blood Mountain material, the skull is associated with overcoming the primitive or “reptilian” portion of the mind and advancing toward another stage of human evolution. The protagonist must carry it to the top of the mountain. That is almost embarrassingly close to what I believed I was doing in 2006. I thought adulthood was something waiting at the summit.
September 11, 2007
Then the journey changed. On 11 September 2007 I was at my first posting, a year almost to the day after the Blood Mountain release cycle had begun. I found myself beyond the firing line on a live firing range without hearing protection, a high-visibility vest, a radio or body armour, while my unit did not know that I was there. I walked out of the scrub with my hands raised. That moment divided my life into before and after. There is a peculiar resonance in remembering it now because Blood Mountain is a wilderness story. Its hero leaves the comprehensible world and enters terrain that progressively strips away certainty. There are forests, predators, starvation, hallucinations, exposure and snow. At one stage the journey becomes so physically desperate that survival requires cutting open a prehistoric creature and taking shelter inside it—an image Sanders compared, with characteristic enthusiasm, to Han Solo putting Luke inside the tauntaun in The Empire Strikes Back. My own wilderness was not metaphorical. I had believed I was entering an institution to replace vulnerability with certainty. Instead, at what felt like the apex of that experiment, I discovered how quickly certainty could vanish. The transformation I received was not the one I had planned. I survived. But the person who walked back from that range was not the same person who had entered the Army nine months earlier. Convalescence followed. Eventually it became clear that I was not returning to the life I had imagined. And somewhere inside that dislocation, Mastodon found me.
Sydney, YouTube and the Sea Beast
By December 2007 I was living in Sydney with my sister and her friend on Fitzroy Street. I was technically on convalescence leave, still suspended between identities: no longer really living the life I had entered, not yet knowing exactly what came next. At other points I stayed with my parents around Kingston in Canberra. The permanence of what had happened was slowly coming into focus. I spent time walking into the city, wandering around, trying to give my mind something else to do. Broadway Shopping Centre mattered because Utopia Records was there. And the internet mattered because YouTube was still small enough to feel less like an industry than a series of trapdoors. Memory inevitably becomes hazy around the mechanisms. I remember one video leading to another—perhaps Tool, perhaps Meshuggah, perhaps something entirely unrelated—and eventually seeing “Seabeast.” There is actually an interesting technological wrinkle here. The sophisticated personalised recommendation system we now associate with YouTube only began taking shape later. Early YouTube was driven far more heavily by search, external links, popularity and related-video pathways around individual clips. So when I remember something appearing in the “recommended” area in late 2007 or early 2008, I am probably remembering that earlier related-video ecology rather than today’s hyper-personalised algorithm. Whatever mechanism put it there, I clicked. The official “Seabeast” video had been uploaded to Relapse’s YouTube account in May 2006. Jonathan Rej and Tom Bingham shot it with a hand-cranked 35mm camera, deliberately using techniques associated with cinema of the 1920s and 1930s.
That was my first Mastodon song. I can still understand why it worked. It did not look like what I had subconsciously categorised as a metal band. It felt older and stranger, theatrical without becoming artificial, monstrous without posturing. The music contained heaviness, certainly, but also melancholy, movement, atmosphere and an almost literary sense of adventure. Soon I was at Utopia. I discovered The Sword around this period. Meshuggah was there. Other records came home with me. But Mastodon was the thing that stuck. Then I found Blood Mountain. And that was it.
The object in the photograph
The little package sitting in the photograph I have taken for this twentieth anniversary is not a retrospective purchase. It is the copy. The Australian edition of Blood Mountain was issued as a CD/DVD package. The second disc contains Jimmy Hubbard’s 43-minute Making of Blood Mountain documentary, the “Capillarian Crest” video and a photo gallery. I bought it in 2008. I have watched that documentary more times than I could possibly calculate. And I love the fact that the making-of material itself belongs completely to the original era rather than being archaeology assembled years later. Mastodon released ten making-of webisodes around the album’s arrival; the final instalments were online by 10 September 2006, two days before the US release, and the band’s official YouTube channel subsequently hosted the episodes. Watching it on my laptop became part of learning what a band could be. Here were four people being serious about their work without needing to perform seriousness about themselves. They could make something technically absurd, psychologically charged, mythologically dense and visually beautiful while remaining funny, grounded and human. That mattered to me enormously. Mastodon never seemed interested in conforming to the visual vocabulary I associated with heavy music. They did not appear interested in proving that they were “metal dudes.” They seemed interested in whatever interested them: Neurosis, Thin Lizzy, Genesis, Melvins, King Crimson, southern rock, psychedelia, hardcore, progressive rock, country picking, science fiction, mythology, film, ridiculous jokes, impossible rhythms and whatever else could survive being placed inside the same animal.
Even in 2006 they understood themselves that way. Sanders described Mastodon alongside groups like Isis and The Mars Volta as “thinking man’s heavy music,” while Kelliher spoke during the album’s development about bringing in King Crimson, delay-heavy space music, country and bluegrass ideas without abandoning the band’s heaviness. That universality became part of the appeal. They did not tell me what taste I had to possess. They gave me permission to possess all of it. Around the same time, I crossed another small threshold: tattoos. I had hesitated for years. Watching these people inhabit their bodies so casually helped dissolve some of that hesitation. My first tattoos became designs of my own. Again: transformation. Again: the mountain.
The real Blood Mountain
Mastodon’s concept is wonderfully simple. A figure must ascend a mountain carrying—or seeking—the Crystal Skull. The journey exposes him to hunger, strange creatures, hallucinatory states, violence and increasingly desperate survival. Sanders described it in 2006 as the things that can happen when someone is stranded on a mountain, lost in the woods, starving, hallucinating and being hunted. But the band also knew that the mountain was themselves. After Leviathan, Mastodon were leaving Relapse for Warner Bros. They had achieved a level of acclaim that created a new problem: what next? Kelliher described signing to Warner as a mountain they now had to climb. Hinds was even more succinct: Warner Bros. was the Blood Mountain. Sanders later explained that the record’s climb was metaphorical to their own sacrifices—the new label, the album, relentless touring and the strange consequences of ambition. He talked about paying for houses he barely slept in and the blurry line between dedication and insanity. That revelation changes the record. It means the protagonist is not merely an invented barbarian somewhere in Paul Romano’s red wilderness. It is Mastodon. It is anyone who has ever mistaken ascent for safety. And, inevitably, it became me. The Crystal Skull promises transformation. The protagonist believes that if he can only cross enough hostile terrain and put this object where it belongs, something fundamental can be overcome. The animal brain can be transcended. A higher condition is possible. Twenty-year-old me understood that completely. Thirty-seven-year-old me understands it differently. Transformation does occur. It just does not obey your specification. And triumph, I have come to understand, does not necessarily mean conquest. Sometimes triumph is simply the fact that transformation occurred and that you remained present long enough to meet the person who emerged from it. That is the cycle: trial, transformation, triumph. Not a straight road upwards. A circle.
The ascent
I have never thought Blood Mountain benefits from being reduced to a rigid screenplay. Mastodon themselves didn’t treat it that way. Sanders said that having a central idea allowed them to branch outward until what emerged resembled a deranged film plot. The mountain is coherent enough to inhabit but porous enough for the listener to bring their own ordeal into it. So this is not an attempt to declare that every second of the album corresponds to one canonical plot action. It is the journey I hear twenty years later.
The Wolf Is Loose
The album does not begin by introducing the traveller politely. Brann Dailor detonates the journey into existence. “The Wolf Is Loose” is departure without ceremony. Campbell’s vocabulary appears almost immediately: the belly of the whale, refusal of return, threshold-crossing. Even the title suggests that something contained has escaped. What I hear now is the terrible exhilaration of deciding that the existing self is inadequate. That was me shaving my head in 2006. The wolf is not necessarily evil. It is appetite, motion, aggression, the animal machinery required to leave the familiar world. The tragedy is that young people are particularly susceptible to believing transformation requires hatred of the person they currently are. I thought I had to destroy the beast. Blood Mountain proposes something more complicated: the beast is also what gets you moving. Musically, nothing waits. Dailor’s opening is almost absurdly immediate; the guitars arrive already in motion. Contemporary critics recognised it as an announcement that the technical and progressive tendencies of Leviathan had intensified dramatically. The journey begins before we are ready. That is usually how journeys begin.
Crystal Skull
Then comes the objective. The Crystal Skull is the thing at the summit, the talisman that supposedly makes transcendence possible. In the band’s mythology, it is associated with evolution beyond the primitive brain. Scott Kelly enters the song like another geological layer; Sanders later called his contribution the record’s “most thunderous moment” and personally regarded it as an album highlight. There is an obvious danger embedded in the idea of the skull. If transformation depends upon obtaining one perfect object, passing one test, entering one institution, achieving one rank, surviving one ordeal—then everything becomes conditional. When I reach that, I will become a different person. I recognise that logic. The Army was my Crystal Skull. Years later, other things became it. The wisdom of the record is that it does not end here. The object is identified at track two. Ten tracks of consequences follow.
Sleeping Giant
“Sleeping Giant” is the first moment in which Blood Mountain seems to look upward and comprehend scale. The strings—violin and cello appear on the recording—stretch the landscape outward, and the song moves with a majesty that the opening tracks deliberately deny. Every serious ordeal eventually contains this moment. The initial adrenaline subsides. The mountain reveals how large it actually is. The great insight of Campbell was not that heroes are people without fear. It is that crossing the threshold reorganises the scale of the world. The forces waiting beyond it are larger than the ego that voluntarily entered. When I joined the Army, I believed discipline would be something I applied to myself. Eventually I discovered systems bigger than myself. A sleeping giant has awakened.
Capillarian Crest
Even the title is anatomical geography: capillaries becoming ridgelines, blood becoming landscape. This is one of the album’s essential tricks. The mountain and the body continually blur together. Earth has veins. Flesh becomes terrain. Blood has elevation. Musically, “Capillarian Crest” is almost hostile in its refusal to stand still. Rhythmic identities appear, mutate and vanish; complexity is not decorative but environmental. The track makes orientation itself difficult. That is one of the reasons Blood Mountain has survived repeated listening for me. Its technicality never feels like a spreadsheet. The musicianship behaves narratively. You are climbing it. Every time you think you understand the footing, it changes.
Circle of Cysquatch
And then comes one of my favourite creatures in any mythology. The Cysquatch is Mastodon’s invention: an enormous one-eyed mountain being. Sanders explained that although the creatures initially appear terrifying, they are actually benevolent. They surround the traveller, who assumes he is about to be eaten, and instead they offer warning and guidance. This is where the album’s twenty-year relationship with Greek mythology becomes fascinating. A one-eyed giant inevitably evokes the Cyclops, but Mastodon reverses the expectation. The Cysquatch does not simply occupy the monster position. It sees. It knows. The supposed beast is capable of kindness. That is an idea that means more to me now than it did in 2008. Appearances invert. Categories fail. The frightening creature may be the guide. The institution you imagined would save you may become the source of injury. The self you believed needed to be destroyed may turn out to have been someone who needed care. The monster and mentor exchange masks. That is much closer to adulthood than the simple transformation I imagined at nineteen.
Bladecatcher
There are no conventional lyrics here to explain what is happening. There shouldn’t be. “Bladecatcher” is the ordeal reduced to nervous system. It convulses, darts and laughs at its own extremity. Human vocal noises appear almost as another instrument. Mastodon’s sense of humour is critical here. The album may be mythic, but it never becomes pompous. That distinction is one of the reasons they became my band. Profundity does not require solemnity. Sometimes surviving the impossible involves recognising its absurdity.
Colony of Birchmen
The forest itself becomes animate. Josh Homme appears inside the song, one of several guests who make Blood Mountain feel less like an isolated band performance and more like a strange gathering of neighbouring tribes. “Colony of Birchmen” eventually earned Mastodon their first Grammy nomination. Sanders recalled that Homme’s contribution emerged naturally from friendship and mutual admiration; Mastodon had played with Queens of the Stone Age, loved both Kyuss and Queens, and simply sent him the track while he was working in Los Angeles. The same is true of Cedric Bixler-Zavala. Mastodon had apparently extracted a drunken promise from him in London at five in the morning that he would appear on the next record, then later reminded him of it and sent him “Siberian Divide.” This is another thing I loved. The mountain was not constructed out of genre boundaries. It had doors.
Hunters of the Sky
By this point the mountain has begun actively hunting the protagonist. Predators come from above. Shelter is no longer guaranteed. The traveller is not conquering the landscape; he is reacting to it. This is important. Popular storytelling often turns adversity into evidence of superiority: the hero wins because the hero is strong. Blood Mountain is messier. The traveller runs. He hides. He starves. He becomes disoriented. He survives by improvisation. That feels much closer to actual ordeal. Sometimes survival is not defeating the thing coming toward you. Sometimes it is getting out of its way.
Hand of Stone
Here the language of transformation becomes dangerous. Strength, nature, temptation, poison, perception and violence start bleeding together. The traveller appears to ingest something that changes his consciousness; the later “This Mortal Soil” continues the hallucinatory logic. I hear “Hand of Stone” now as the shadow version of self-improvement. Become harder. Become stronger. Become less sensitive. Become impossible to injure. That promise is seductive because sensitivity feels like the thing that allowed injury in the first place. But a stone hand cannot feel. If you organise your life entirely around never being wounded again, you may succeed only by eliminating the faculties that make life meaningful. Twenty years ago I heard power. Today I hear the cost of armour.
This Mortal Soil
This may be the album’s philosophical centre. Bill Kelliher explicitly identified Blood Mountain with earth, following the fire imagery of Remission and the water of Leviathan. “This Mortal Soil” is where that elemental idea becomes existential. The traveller is not above nature. He is made of it. The summit, the body, the blood, the ground and mortality are all parts of the same system. This is the moment where the heroic fantasy begins to surrender to finitude. We are mortal soil. I did not understand that sentence at nineteen in the way I understand it now. There are conditions you cannot discipline away. There are accidents after which your previous trajectory does not resume. There are people you lose. There are versions of yourself you cannot recover. There are mountains you cannot dominate. None of that negates agency. It merely changes what agency means.
Siberian Divide
Then comes the cold. “Siberian Divide” may be the purest survival narrative on the record. The traveller is frostbitten, starving, buried in snow, caught beneath avalanche conditions and reduced to grotesque improvisations to remain alive. Cedric Bixler-Zavala appears within the storm; Ikey Owens of The Mars Volta would appear on the following track. The guest list links two bands that became enormously important to me at almost exactly the same period. That coincidence has always meant something personally. Shortly after my Army accident, while I was in hospital, “Wax Simulacra” entered my life. The Mars Volta then opened another enormous musical door for me. And there was Cedric, already hidden inside Blood Mountain, waiting for me before I knew the connection existed. “Siberian Divide” is where the heroic journey approaches physical annihilation. The summit is near. That makes the danger worse, not better. Anyone who has endured a long trial understands this. Nearness to an imagined end can produce its own desperation. You start bargaining with yourself: just reach that date, that decision, that threshold, and then everything can begin again. The mountain does not recognise your schedule. It snows anyway.
Pendulous Skin
And then Mastodon do something beautiful. They do not finish with a victory anthem. They dissolve. “Pendulous Skin” is narcotic, spacious, melancholy. Isaiah “Ikey” Owens contributes organ and synthesizer, giving the ending a texture unlike anything that preceded it. On original versions, its long tail of silence eventually reveals Josh Homme’s absurd hidden spoken message. It is the strangest possible ending to an album about ascent. Which means it is probably the right one. There is no fanfare saying the protagonist has evolved correctly. No certificate arrives. The journey simply changes state. That is what I have come to believe about transformation. You almost never notice the exact instant it occurs. You discover later that the person who entered the mountain no longer exists. And perhaps that is where triumph actually resides. Not in standing at the summit with arms raised, but in the quieter recognition that you passed through the thing, that it changed you, and that some new version of you has now taken the next step. Trial. Transformation. Triumph. Then the circle turns.
Crack the Skye on the horizon
My first period of intense Mastodon discovery therefore happened between worlds. Blood Mountain was already behind the band. Crack the Skye was approaching. I remember sitting at my computer listening to the earliest fragment of “Oblivion” online. My memory places it in 2008, which makes sense emotionally because the anticipation for the new album was already building that year. The surviving web chronology, however, is slightly more complicated. Mastodon were discussing Crack the Skye publicly by late November 2008. Apple and some contemporary metadata associate an Oblivion digital release with 3 December 2008, but the clearest surviving contemporary news reports documenting the official-site “Oblivion” teaser are from 21–26 January 2009. “Divinations” then premiered on BBC Radio 1 on 26/27 January. So I no longer want to pretend my memory can distinguish perfectly between December 2008 and January 2009. What I remember precisely is the feeling. Something was coming. Again. And this time I knew who Mastodon were. I had joined them between mountains.
Twenty years later
There is an almost impossible symmetry to celebrating Blood Mountain now. On 28 August 2026, fifteen days before Blood Mountain turned twenty, Mastodon released Marrow Deep. It arrives after enormous upheaval in the band’s life and centres itself on another ancient framework: the Three Fates of Greek mythology. The band has explicitly described Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos—the spinning, measuring and cutting of life’s thread—as the album’s governing metaphor for transition, resilience and solidarity. Twenty years separate the one-eyed watcher and the three women who manufacture destiny. And here, again, are three. The recurrence feels almost too perfect to ignore. The Fates themselves form a triptych: the beginning of the thread, its measure, its ending. Birth, life, death. And from that ending, whether literally or symbolically, another beginning. In my own language for Blood Mountain, the corresponding movement has become trial, transformation, triumph. Three points making the circle perceptible. One state producing the next. That fascinates me. The Cysquatch can see what lies ahead. The Fates determine how long the thread will run. Blood Mountain asks what happens when a creature sets out to change itself. Marrow Deep arrives after experience has taught the band that no amount of will can make a life infinitely controllable. That is an extraordinary evolution for a body of work. It is also impossible for me not to hear personally. When I first found Blood Mountain, I believed transformation meant taking control of fate.
Today I suspect transformation often means developing a relationship with what cannot be controlled. That is not resignation. It may be the opposite. It is continuing to climb without requiring the mountain to promise you anything. Paul Romano remains part of that continuity. He created Blood Mountain’s artwork and returned for Marrow Deep, where the band wanted colour rather than the monochrome mourning of Hushed and Grim. Troy Sanders has described Romano disappearing into the work and returning with an enormous painting dense with lines, colours, shapes, meanings and visual details. Twenty years apart, these records speak visually to one another. The mountain remains. The mythology changes. So do we.
Kindred
I have sometimes wondered why Mastodon became more than a favourite band. I think part of the answer is that they represented integration at a point in my life when I was attempting division. I had been dividing myself into acceptable and unacceptable pieces. Strong and weak. Adult and child. Healthy and broken. Disciplined and chaotic. Mastodon sounded like none of those separations were necessary. Extreme metal could contain beauty. Technical music could contain stupidity and humour. Fantasy could describe real suffering. A tattooed heavy band could be gentle. Prog could coexist with punk. King Crimson could coexist with Melvins. A song could contain a monster, a joke, a psychological wound and an impossible drum fill without having to choose which one was its “real” identity. That was freedom. Over time I have had opportunities to connect with the band, and my gratitude for them has only intensified. “Kindred” is the word I keep arriving at—not because I pretend to know every private dimension of people I admire, but because their work has accompanied so many changes in my own life that its presence now feels familial. Today I have also moved away from much of what the internet became. I have permanently stepped away from the endless visual platforms, the obligation to broadcast, optimise, perform, react and remain visible. And perhaps appropriately, after all these years, I find myself back at something much closer to the old internet through which I first encountered Mastodon.
A small Blogspot. Quiet. Almost invisible. Enough. There is something circular about that too. In 2008 I found a strange video on a comparatively young YouTube and walked into Utopia Records looking for the physical object attached to it. In 2026 I am surrounded by platforms engineered to make everything instantaneous, quantifiable and public, and I find myself wanting instead to place a photograph of an old CD/DVD, a framed map and a battered signed survival guide on a tiny personal website and write about what they mean. That feels right. The object survives. The story survives. The person changes.
Twenty years up the mountain
The photograph I took today contains more of my life than anyone scrolling past it could know. There is the survival guide. There is the map. There is the Australian Blood Mountain CD/DVD I bought while trying to understand what my life was going to become after the Army. I can look at that small square package and see Sydney. Fitzroy Street. Broadway. Utopia. My laptop. The Making of Blood Mountain DVD playing again. Cedric appearing in “Siberian Divide.” The Mars Volta entering my life from another direction. My first tattoos. The first time “Sleeping Giant” expanded in front of me. The opening fill of “The Wolf Is Loose.” The strange feeling that four men from Atlanta had somehow built a fantasy world that understood something I had not yet managed to formulate about my own experience. And now, twenty years after Blood Mountain was released, I find myself facing another mountain. I won’t describe it here in full. It is enough to say that it is real. And so I am listening again. That is what this record has become for me: not an escape from trial, but a ritual for entering it. The younger version of me believed the purpose of suffering was to reach the summit and become someone invulnerable. I don’t believe that anymore. The purpose, if suffering can be said to have one at all, is not automatically improvement. Pain is not morally educational merely because we survived it. Sometimes terrible things are simply terrible things.
The transformation comes from what we choose to make around them. That is different. And triumph is not the denial of what happened. It is not pretending the trial was secretly a gift. It is the act of carrying whatever transformation was possible out of the wilderness and back into life. Trial. Transformation. Triumph. The three are not separate chapters so much as phases of the same movement. Triumph eventually becomes the ground on which another trial begins; another trial demands another transformation; another transformation makes another kind of triumph imaginable. Birth, death, rebirth. Departure, ordeal, return. The circle does not close because life is finished. It closes so that it can begin again. Mastodon understood something like this intuitively in 2006. They were facing the pressure of following Leviathan, signing to a major label and spending most of their lives away from home. So they built a mountain. They populated it with one-eyed prophets, tree-creatures, flying predators, prehistoric animals and a magical skull. They turned the anxiety of ambition into geography. I took illness, the Army, injury, convalescence and the uncertainty of becoming someone else, and eventually discovered that same geography waiting for me. The mountain is therefore not the terrible thing. The mountain is the form we give the terrible thing so that it can be traversed. That may be why I keep returning. Every new trial makes the record slightly different because I am slightly different.
At twenty, Blood Mountain was about becoming. At thirty-seven, it is about enduring becoming. The distinction is enormous. There is no final Crystal Skull. There is no single evolutionary threshold beyond which the primitive self disappears and the perfected adult begins. There are only repeated departures. Thresholds. Forests. Warnings. Mistaken monsters. Temporary shelters. Things we thought would save us. Things we thought would destroy us. Cold. Return. And eventually another call to climb. Joseph Campbell called it the hero’s journey. Mastodon turned it into blood, soil and noise. I have spent almost two decades discovering that it is also life. And so on the twentieth anniversary of my favourite album, by my favourite band, during another period in which I do not yet know what waits on the other side, I am grateful that the record never promised an easy summit. It promised the mountain. It promised the trial. It made transformation possible. And, sometimes, simply continuing the climb is the triumph. That was enough. It still is.