I met Brent Hinds a few years ago at a Mastodon gig. For some reason, he was standing next to me at the public bar, waiting in line to buy a drink, rather than staying out of sight backstage, so I introduced myself as a writer for Guitar World’s sister magazine, Total Guitar, and bought him a beer and a shot.
We talked briefly before he headed backstage, but I couldn’t quite figure him out. My impression was that he was a bit of an introvert, perhaps not that good with new people – someone who saved his flamboyance for the stage.
In his personality, Hinds – who died August 20 in a traffic collision in Atlanta at age 51 – was rather like the music of Mastodon. Their eight studio albums are epic, progressive and thought-through, but none of the music is easy to digest or understand, making the elevated commercial position they hold damn-near miraculous. Mastodon never recorded a substandard album, either. From day one, they were a force of nature.
But Hinds’ own songwriting and performing was unique to itself; he blended genres deliberately but effortlessly, denying that he was anything as limited as “a metal guitarist” in GW and elsewhere.
![Mastodon - Teardrinker [Official Music Video] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/sx1L2XW1N0c/maxresdefault.jpg)
Hinds was born in Helena, Alabama, in 1974 and listened to country musicians as a kid, later namechecking Johnny Paycheck and Jerry Reed, in particular the latter’s guitar playing.
He attended the Alabama School of Fine Arts and later moved to Atlanta, where he joined bassist Troy Sanders’ band, Four Hour Fogger. The two musicians later formed Mastodon with Kelliher and drummer Brann Dailor, who they’d met at a High On Fire show, initially performing as a quintet with singer Eric Saner.
A demo led to a deal with Relapse, and when Saner quit, an unusual setup developed in which lead vocals were alternately delivered by Sanders, Hinds and Dailor; a debut album, Remission (2000), attracted immediate attention and Mastodon rapidly built a profile.
March of the Fire Ants was an immediate fan favorite, demonstrating the group’s unorthodox but compelling set of influences – think Metallica and Rush meet Isis and Neurosis, plus Hinds’ love of country guitar – and a fanbase swiftly coalesced.
The ambitious concept album Leviathan (2004), based on Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick, has become a 21st-century milestone for its progressive-metal mastery, appearing in several best-of-the-decade polls.
High-profile tours with Slayer, Lamb of God and Slipknot took the Mastodon message to the public and, after a compilation called Call of the Mastodon, a step up to the Warner label took the band even further.
High points that remember from Mastodon’s early-2000s trajectory include Colony of Birchmen from Blood Mountain (2006), featuring Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age; the psychedelic inspirations of Crack the Skye (2009), featuring Hinds’ amazing hybrid picking on Divinations; tours with Metallica and Dethklok; and their soundtrack to the 2010 movie Jonah Hex.
Curl of the Burl from The Hunter (2011) nabbed a Grammy nomination, Mastodon toured America with Opeth and Ghost in 2012, and your kids leaped off their cinema seats in excitement that year when a blast of Island was heard in Monsters University.
The upward trend continued with Once More ’Round the Sun (2014); appearances by Hinds, Dailor and Kelliher as undead adversaries in Game of Thrones in 2015; Emperor of Sand (2017), on which Hinds’ pentatonic mastery is on display on Roots Remain; and an EP called Cold Dark Place – inspired, said Hinds, by the end of a relationship.
“I wrote some pretty dark, beautiful, spooky, funky, ethereal, melancholy music, which also sounds like the Bee Gees a little bit,” Hinds said with typical sly humor. A 2019 cover of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven came from a similar place of sadness – the death of manager Nick John – and Mastodon’s most recent LP, Hushed and Grim, appeared in 2021.
Hinds didn’t talk much about his personal life, although we do know the title track of The Hunter was written for his brother Brad, who died on a hunting trip in 2010.
Occasionally he alluded to past trauma (“There’s hurt and anger that have afflicted us through our lives… the only way we can deal with it is to have these songs that go out to our fallen brothers and sisters”) and he also discussed a Xanax addiction with GW in 2022.
“I used to have constant anxiety about getting in a bus accident or a plane crash,” he said. “And then big crowds of people give me anxiety. So I’ve lived with anxiety for 20 years, and I was hooked on Xanax for 15 years, and I had to wean myself off of it a little bit at a time because it was compromising my breathing…
“One time I couldn’t get it and I had two seizures. So I finally weaned myself off. It took years, but recently I discovered that you need to be anxious and fucking deal with it and that keeps you on your toes and motivated to keep doing shit. Now I try to feed off the anxiety and play guitar.”
Despite Hinds’ issues, his guitar partnership with Kelliher was among the most creative of metal’s last two decades, but that’s not to say the two men operated as one; indeed, their creative processes differed radically.
“We’re opposite sometimes,” Kelliher told GW in 2024. “When I write songs I’ll spend months piecing them together, whereas Brent says, ‘Let’s jam in the studio.’”
When I write songs I’ll spend months piecing them together, whereas Brent says, ‘Let’s jam in the studio
Those differences often paid huge dividends, he told us. “Once in a while, he’ll hear something in what I’m showing him and he’ll come up with his own interpretation. And sometimes he’ll do something that will totally surprise me. Like, I’ll put a bridge in there and I assume he’ll play a solo over that.
“Then he’ll come in the next day and play his part and when I come back in, I’m blown away when I listen back because he put the solo somewhere entirely different, like over a midsection, which I thought would be instrumental. I’ll be like, ‘Whoa, wow! I wouldn’t have put it there, but that’s cool. That sounds killer.’ When it works, it’s a very cool thing to hear because it shines a whole new ray of light on the song.”
Still, those differences in personality and creativity didn’t exactly make it easy for Kelliher, as he diplomatically told GW.
“When Brent writes stuff – and I’ve told him this before – it’s like he’s writing as if he was the only guitar player in the band, because it’s just wild,” he said.
“So I’m trying to learn it and trying to play it over and over. I’m like, ‘Dude, this is really hard.’ He’ll go, ‘Oh no, it’s not hard. Your stuff is hard.’ I’m like, ‘Well, your stuff is hard because it’s almost like you’re playing a guitar solo the whole time.’”
He continued: “It’s very hard for him to teach me stuff and tell me what he’s doing. He doesn’t have any patience for sitting down and showing me what to do. When he plays, I have to video record his exact finger positions on my phone. And then I’ll learn it. But it changes a lot, too.
“I’ll work really hard and learn something one way and then by the next practice he’s changed it, which he can do. It’s his riff until we record it.”
Hinds understood that his own playing was complex, telling GW, “I like to sprawl out in a song. I think living in the city and being cramped around people causes these unconscious decisions for my songwriting.
“The only case scenario I have to really spread out is in a song. Having the kind of sound I have, when I play and get into it, I get kinda lost, and before I know it 13 or 15 minutes have passed.”
The complicated nature of Hinds’ compositions was in itself a challenge, Kelliher said. “There’s a song on Blood Mountain, Capillarian Crest, and when it gets to the midsection he’s playing completely crazy stuff. I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m not even going to try to play that because I’m going to give myself an aneurysm if I try to learn it.’ And then I got to the point where he was doing something really complicated and I went, ‘Okay, I’m never going to play something exactly like you because we’re different kinds of guitar players.’”
Gear-wise, Hinds was a Flying V guy to the core, often playing a silverburst model made by the Gibson Custom Shop, although he also played Les Pauls and SGs. Epiphone made him a signature V when Gibson failed to do so. “I’m pretty disgruntled with the Gibson people,” Hinds told us in 2016. “But Epiphone, if I could give them all a hug or a Valentine’s card, I would!”
The Hinds V is a tough instrument out of necessity; one of his most memorable GW quotes was, “I emphasized to them that I’m gonna wank, spank, slobber, bleed, bend, crunch and crush all over this fucking thing, and the guitar’s gonna need to be able to handle the monster behind it.” He also owned a pedal company, cunningly named Dirty B Hinds.
Mastodon was, despite their prolific output, just one outlet for Hinds. He released a split double album in 2011 from not one but two projects, Fiend Without a Face and West End Motel, and the following year formed a supergroup called Giraffe Tongue Orchestra with members of the Dillinger Escape Plan, Jane’s Addiction and the Mars Volta.
Another all-star project titled Legend of the Seagullmen, featuring Tool drummer Danny Carey, came in 2018.
Hinds either quit Mastodon or was fired from the group five months before his death. The official statement announced that they had “mutually decided to part ways,” a non-explanation that neither he nor the other band members subsequently clarified, as is so often the case in this legally sensitive era.
The group replaced him firstly with YouTuber Ben Eller and then with Nick Johnston, who did a sterling job at Ozzy Osbourne’s farewell show, Back to the Beginning, in Birmingham, England, on July 5.
![Mastodon - Crack The Skye [Live] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/1vGsUQqpByI/maxresdefault.jpg)
Sadly, Hinds’ last words on the subject of Mastodon were bitter ones. In June he wrote (on Instagram), “I won’t miss being in a shit band with horrible humans” and later added in response to a live video from 2012: “My guitar sounds great, but Troy and [Dailor] sound absolutely horrible. They are way out of key. Embarrassing and they kicked me out of the band for embarrassing them for being who I am.
“But what about who they are? They are two people that can’t sing together live or anywhere else in the world. Everything they try to sing in the studio is manipulated by Autotune because they’re incapable of singing in key.
“Only I know who they really are,” he continued. “They are the biggest fans of themselves... I’ve never met three people that were so full of themselves. It’s disgusting.”
![Mastodon - Full Concert [HD] | Live at Pinkpop 2012 - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/UZU8I-ccasA/maxresdefault.jpg)
Kelliher rose above all this, writing in tribute, “We had our good and bad times, just like in any relationship… I didn’t think you’d be taken from us like this, [with the] absolute loss of a true, one-of-a-kind guitar wizard extraordinaire. You were a brother, we were a family, you were a wild man not to be tamed.”
A sad ending to a unique trajectory, then, and equally sadly, not the first or the last time that genius has proved a terminal obstacle to creative collaboration.
Hinds’ wild-card nature was summed up in the words of Shirley Manson of Garbage, who wrote: “I am utterly devastated to learn of your death… the world is so much less wild and free and beautiful without you in it. Rest easy my brother. Keep me a seat at the bar, will you?”
- This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.
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