Crack the Skye by Mastodon Song Info
Drummer Brann Dailor (who writes most of the lyrics) told MTV News that this song is meant as a homage to his deceased sister. He explained: "My sister passed away when I was a teenager and it was awful, and there's no better way to pay tribute to a lost loved one than having an opportunity to be in a group with my friends and we make art together. Her name was Skye, so Crack The Skye means a lot of different things. For me personally, it means the moment of being told you lost someone dear to you, [that moment] is enough to crack the sky. Death is part of life. Everybody goes through loss at some point in their life, but when someone commits suicide very young, it has very damaging, lasting effects. It's our duty as musicians and artists to reach down as deep as possible into human and life experiences and put that into your art. And it felt like Brent [Hinds, vocals & guitar] was coming from a deeper place, musically, so I felt like perfect opportunity to connect with him." This song features vocals and lyrics by Scott Kelly of Neurosis. Dailor explained to The Quietus: "He is one of our closest friends, an amazing person and every time we get an opportunity to make some art we want to include him in the process. It's become tradition I guess." Guitarist Bill Kelliher explained to The Skinny magazine that this, "is one of the heavier, doomier, songs on the record. We had the main riff floating around for a while, like maybe a year – year and a half, basically just heard Scott Kelly's [Neurosis] voice all over it. That's when we called him out to sing on it. For his part, we gave him the lyrics for the rest of the record so he could get a feel for what was going on." Dailor explained to Billboard the concept behind the Crack The Skye album: "It's about a crippled young man who experiments with astral travel. He goes up into outer space, goes too close to the sun, gets his golden umbilical cord burned off, flies into a wormhole, is thrust into the spirit real, has conversations with spirits about the fact that he's not really dead, and they decide to help him. They put him into a divination that's being performed by an early-20th-century Russian Orthodox sect called the Klisti, which Rasputin is part of. Knowing Rasputin is about to be murdered, they put the young boy's spirit inside of Rasputin. Rasputin goes to usurp the throne of the czar and is murdered by the Yusupovs, and the boy and Rasputin fly out of Rasputin's body up through the crack in the sky and head back. Rasputin gets him safely back into his body."
