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10/1: The Mars Volta
by Ed Masley - Sept. 29, 2008 03:40 PM
The Arizona Republic
You might think the Mars Volta guitarist/producer Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and lyricist/vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala are always on the lookout for a unifying theme when they're working on an album.

But Rodriguez-Lopez says they prefer to let the concept come to them.

"I think every album has a concept or a central theme," he says. "It just is, in the same way we breathe oxygen, the same way we live, and we're not even entirely conscious of decisions that we make until we're looking back. It's never like we start off an album and we go, 'Ah, this is gonna be the theme.' You start the process and the theme appears."

The concept for this year's The Bedlam in Goliath, for example, arrived in the form of a Ouija Board, The Soothsayer, bought by Rodriguez-Lopez in a curio shop in Jerusalem as a present for Bixler-Zavala.

At first, it was fun, telling stories of murder and lust. But over time, the board began demanding things and threatening oblivion. The band's official bio talks of the board as "a metaphysical quagmire and unfed saint" named Goliath.

Soon, things started going wrong. Their drummer left. Their singer hurt his foot. The seemingly stable recording engineer suffered a nervous breakdown. There was a flood in Rodriguez-Lopez's home studio.

So they buried the board in the soil, convinced they'd been cursed.

But the recording remained - a dark album whose lyrical concept began to emerge as Bixler-Zavala started working in lines from the notes he'd scribbled in his diary from their sessions with the board.

At first, Rodriguez-Lopez was convinced they shouldn't put the record out.

"I didn't want to play those songs," he says. "And I sure as (expletive) didn't want to talk about it."

This was in March 2007, and as Rodriguez-Lopez recalls his conversations with the label, "They were like, 'Well, we're not gonna put it out until next January so just wait and see if you change your mind. If not, record your new album and we'll put that one out instead.' "

And over time, he says, "The normal thing that happens happened, which is that you start to gain a new perspective. You start to come out of one period into another, very much in the same way you experience a death. You go through anger. You go through resentment. You go through a very dark period. And then, eventually, one day, spring happens and you discover your smile again. You discover laughter. Now, I can laugh at myself for having been so depraved."

So was he just being depraved? Or were they really cursed?

"At the time," Rodriguez-Lopez says, "it was very heavy and very dark and very chaotic - sort of like a black hole. You know how those things are. Once you have that one thing in your head, when things are going bad or negative in your life, you start to gear everything else toward that same black hole. You make things manifest themselves in the shape of the experience you're having."

Either way, that's all behind him now. He recently finished production on the follow-up, due in March. And he's already started writing music for the album after that.

He won't go into details as to any underlying concept that may have presented itself in the course of working on the next one, but Rodriguez-Lopez will say that he did his best to change things up a bit.

"I tried to . . . restrict myself from using certain elements and tools that I'd used in the past because there's nothing worse than making the same record over and over," he says. "It makes me want to vomit. For a certain type of fan, it's actually the opposite. They hear one thing they like and want a band to do that same thing over and over. They want to reach that same feeling over and over like a drug addict. And from this end, God, that sounds like life in prison."

He'd like to make each record as different as possible, he says, "until hopefully by the end of this band's lifespan the beginning is completely different from the end and you say, 'Wow, I can't believe that was the same band.' That's where I'd like to be headed."