Boundaries be Damned

What was the first thing you felt when you heard about Lost and Found’s place on the charts?
Shock. If I had any expectations, this is definitely past them. I think that one of the weirdest things is suddenly seeing yourself in terms of being a #2 Billboard-charting band right after Mariah Carey. It’s very realistic now to say that Mudvayne is a pop band. We’re popular.

Do you remember where you were and what you were doing when you got the call?
I want to be delicate about this. I found out about [hitting #2 on the Billboard charts] five minutes before I found out about the tragedy that American Head Charge had on our tour. I don’t really feel that it’s appropriate for me to talk about that because it’s a sacred thing for American Head Charge, but it was definitely something that helps you appreciate what is most important in life. I think that regardless of selling records, making money and experiencing commercial success, creating art is the most life-affirming experience you can have. If you lose touch with that and all we’re talking about is record sales, I think that’s a really grave loss.

If there is one, what would you say is the biggest misconception about Mudvayne?
I think that art is, in a certain sense, defined by misconception. Once you’ve created something and you’ve put it out there for an audience, you almost hope that it is misconceived in the sense that you hope that people build a personal relationship to it and make it their own.

That’s probably the most interesting response to that question anyone will ever come up with.
Thanks. To literally answer the question, I think that people have weird perceptions that we’re a bunch of mathematicians or physicists who sit around with calculators, abaci and reams of paper and that our songs are these delicately conceived mathematical formulas and nothing could really be farther from the truth. The initial impetus for how we create is a very intuitive and reactionary process.

You guys don’t exactly make elevator music. Who the hell thinks you sit around all day with calculators?
I guess it all started with that whole math metal thing. That started off as kind of a joke. I think Chad said something like, “Yeah, it’s math metal; bring your abacus.” People are so in need of definitions that it’s hard to accept that sometimes things just don’t make sense. Being the anomaly that we are, people needed to put us in some sort of box and say, “Okay, they’re the guys who wear makeup and play math metal,” but I really think that really limits what we are and tightens the scope way too much.

Speaking of makeup and misconceptions, care to clear up any about the lack of makeup in the current imagery surrounding the new album?
[The lack of makeup] is absolutely coincidental. There’s no literal correlation you can draw between wearing makeup on stage and what the new record is about, although I would tell anyone who thinks that we’ve quit wearing makeup that they’re going to be sadly disappointed. I could walk on stage tomorrow wearing a wig and a Tin Man suit [laughs]. Seriously.

If the lack of makeup has no correlation to the content of the album, is there something else you would say that it correlates to?
We actually started going onstage with no makeup on about two years ago, right before the Summer Sanitarium Tour. Everyone wants to try and write some message into everything that people do, but there is a lot about Mudvayne that involves working with the accidents — it’s intuitive and not specifically rational or literal. I think the contrast between the very dramatic imaging that we’ve done in the past and the starkness of what we’re doing now and what we’re going to be doing in the future is unsettling and dramatic enough to get the point across that we’re not dictated by content, but we’re driven by
a process.

How has that process evolved between your previous album, The End of All Things to Come, and Lost and Found?
I always try to be careful with assuming that there is a linear progression between the records — that this record is picking up where the last one left off or that we’re getting smarter or some bullshit like that. This record isn’t so much as a progression from the past one as it is an exploration of pre-existing space that we hadn’t focused on in our previous records. With this record, instead of going into more grandiose, cosmic, big-picture ideas and concepts that were motivations on the past records, Lost and Found is more about exploring the intimacy of the human experience.

Out of your musical experience as a whole, what would you say you are most thankful for?
That’s a complex question. To answer it simply, I was thankful way before we got signed when I started experiencing creative freedom and having those life-affirming experiences where I created something that felt realized and pure to me. Kind of like a sense of waking up. I would say that I’m very grateful for that.

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