Live-Metal.Net - Interviews: Mudvayne: Matthew McDonough and Ryan Martinie

Mudvayne kept a low profile after completing the cycle of their successful 2005 release, Lost and Found. But that doesn’t mean they haven’t been busy. November saw the release of The New Game, the first of two new albums the band has written and recorded during the last two years. When the first leg of their tour (also featuring 10 Years and the reconstituted Snot) stopped at Rams Head Live in Baltimore, Md., Live-Metal.net’s Greg Maki sat down backstage for a quick chat with drummer Matthew McDonough and bassist Ryan Martinie.

Live-Metal.net: You just had the new album come out, but I guess to you guys it’s not all that new. It’s been done for a while now, right?

Matthew McDonough: Yeah, a couple years.

Matthew McDonough: Writing started in August of ’06 and we finished recording in something like maybe July of ’07.

Was the approach to this album any different than the earlier ones?

Ryan Martinie: No, I don’t believe so. I think it’s always been kind of listen to each other’s ideas and we go from there. We have this circular process. The ideas go round and round in a circle. Put ‘em all in a pot and stir ‘em up and see what happens, see what comes out. See what survives, see what makes it. Some things make the cut, some things don’t. Some things get digested back into other songs, and just start boiling things down.

How long does it take to get a song done? Your music is a little more complex than just some guys jamming in a room together, right?

Matthew McDonough: I wouldn’t really consider any of the songs done probably until we record ‘em. Stuff can change right there in the studio while we’re tracking a song that we might’ve been working on for six months. So it’s really hard to say. And then sometimes songs can change even when we start touring later on.

Matthew McDonough: Obviously, after it’s tracked that’s it.

Ryan Martinie: But we have artistic license over our own songs, at least to do with them what we will at any point in time. We’re not foreign to that idea in a creative process, in a writing process. We’re really, OK, well this has been working, but you know what? It’s not the best thing that can go here. Later, it goes. Let’s do something else there. Let’s create something else. Well, what else do we have? Nope, that doesn’t work, gotta create something. Or we have something.

The title of the album is The New Game. Obviously, there’s a song called “A New Game.” What came first, the song or the title?

Matthew McDonough: The song.

We hope it will create awareness among people. We hope we can help to plant a seed in people’s minds because of which they will go and inform themselves on the ways the world really works. If we can create a sense of strength in people that will make them stand up and wanna fight for their freedom, then we have reached our goal.

Matthew McDonough: Why not? [laughs] It works. It fit the record. Something we could all agree on. It’s that simple.

I think this album—and the other albums, too, they have a real flow to them. The songs all kind of complement each other. Is that something you put a lot of thought into?

Matthew McDonough: All of the songs on the record are generally written around the same period of time. It’s not like we have songs that were written eight years ago that we bring back for this record. There’s the commonality of the headspace that we’re all in during the writing process, so it kind of lends some cohesiveness, fortunately.

Ryan Martinie: And also, the sequencing, too. We definitely invest time into the sequencing of the record. During the writing, of course we had “Fish Out of Water.” We’re going through the songs and as soon as [guitarist] Greg [Tribbett] added that top end, screaming high part at the beginning when it kicks in, it was like that’s got to go at the beginning of the record. It’s those moments where everybody hears something together and you know that’s the right thing for that moment for this record. But we do invest time into the sequencing of the record and try to pay attention to how the songs feel. You want to create some peaks and valleys for people. You don’t want all the fast songs at the front and all the slow songs at the end or vice versa. You try to work with the songs that you’ve written during that time period and give it a cohesive flow.

So you get this album done, and Chad and Greg go off and do the HellYeah stuff. What are the two of you doing during that time?

Matthew McDonough: Well, we’ve been saying it all along. We just wrote and recorded two records in two years. So we really haven’t had any time off. As far as what they were doing, they were working before and after and in between all of our schedules. So we pretty much worked solid from the summer of ’06.

When you started working on the second new album, was it any different going on to another album without the usual sort of feedback [on the previous album]—if you even pay attention to that—from fans and reviews or anything like that?

Matthew McDonough: Not really.

Ryan Martinie: Approach was the same.

Matthew McDonough: Honestly, we had to write, so we just started writing. We don’t have a lot of expectations when we start writing a record. We just do it.

Matthew McDonough: It’s a lot different, actually. Our newest record has some of the oddest, most fringe-type stuff that we’ve ever written, very slow, very accessible, some of the fastest stuff we’ve ever done. Just in a different place when we started writing. We came out doing New Game and I think maybe there was just a sense of being happy that we finished that record. There was almost kind of a feeling of we can almost push boundaries and have fun with the latest record. As always, we really didn’t have any expectations.

Ryan Martinie: Well, really, we did work with Dave on this one, but—

Matthew McDonough: Actually, he’s executive [producer] on this record. He didn’t actually produce this latest record.

Ryan Martinie: Jeremy Parker—

Matthew McDonough: And we produced it.

Ryan Martinie: Jeremy’s been with us as our first engineer—

Matthew McDonough: Since Lost and Found.

Ryan Martinie: Lost and Found, yeah.

Matthew McDonough: We always go through a pre-production process before we record, though, where we bounce off the song arrangements. We bounce it off of Dave, and we had that on the new record, also, where he comments and gives his feedback and we make changes together, or say, “This is good. Let’s record.” We did that with him before recording the record, and Dave, basically, every few weeks, month, came in and was checking up on what we were doing. So we had him as kind of a sounding board.

Matthew McDonough: Yeah, we have a week and a half, two weeks.

Ryan Martinie: Yeah, not even two weeks.

Was there some time needed to get some rust off after not touring for a little while?

Matthew McDonough: Oh yeah.

Ryan Martinie: It takes a minute to get things to feel like—We were making fun of ourselves saying that we felt like we were a Mudvayne cover band.

Ryan Martinie: And not a good one at that. We weren’t very good. You get a week into touring, you’re like, OK, so this is how it’s gonna be. You start getting your stage legs back. Now, a month and a half, eight weeks in, now it’s strong. The show’s strong. Things are the way they’re supposed to be every night. A nice, solid show.

How important is the visual side. You guys were kind of known for that, then kind of scaled it back. Where is that now?

Matthew McDonough: We always take advantage of whatever resources we have. We put a lot of thought into our stage set and lighting and try to be fresh and new on every tour that we go on. It’s always been an attitude that the band has had. We take that seriously. That’s consistent with all of our touring.

Matthew McDonough: Yeah, we’ll take January off and then start on another leg in February. It’ll be nice to get that break and get to rest and kind of bounce back after this first leg of touring.

Matthew McDonough: Nah, it’s too soon to say. Honestly, we can’t really make any predictions about releasing the next record until we see how The New Game does.