Justin Jacobs from Pastemagazine.com is reporting:

MASTODON loves a good story.

The Atlanta metal band wrote an album based on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick with 2004’s Leviathan. This year’s Crack The Skye told of a paraplegic traveling through space. But the band’s next project may tell its most ambitious tale yet. As previously reported, Mastodon has written the score to the film adaptation of the gnarly comic book Jonah Hex, which is slated to hit theaters in June 2010.

As Mastodon bassist Troy Sanders told Paste, creating a film score wasn’t entirely different from the band’s usual songwriting process. “Since day one, we’ve always written albums thinking the music was the score of a movie," Sanders said. “Then we’ll create the lyrics or story line on top of that, as if we’re writing the dialogue to match the movie’s cinematography.”

Fittingly, the story of how the band came to work on a flick starring the likes of Josh Brolin, John Malkovich and Megan Fox is worthy of its own album. Mastodon spent much of summer 2009 on the road in Europe with METALLICA. While the nine-week tour, Sanders said, was incredible, it left the band feeling disconnected from home. “I felt my dogs wouldn’t even recognize me,” Sanders said.

Just before crossing back over the Atlantic, Mastodon received a phone call from an enthusiastic fan. It was director Jimmy Hayward, who said he’d been inspired by repeated listenings of Mastodon’s 2008 epic, Blood Mountain, and that said inspiration had helped him finish up a little project he was toiling over—the script for Jonah Hex. The album weighed heavily on Hayward, Sanders said, and so he wanted Mastodon to weigh heavily on his movie. “As opposed to labels profiteering the situation, saying they’d give a band $500,000 to use some song, he called us out of the blue as a fan,” Sanders recalled. “It was the most beautiful, authentic way to collaborate.”

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