In the Studio: The Mars Volta Triumph Over Evil Spirits, Write Shorter Songs for "The Bedlam in Goliath"

Evil spirits tried to sabotage Mars Volta's new record, The Bedlam in Goliath, which is due January 29th. No shit: Guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez bought singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala a Ouija board in Jerusalem, and the duo is convinced that phantoms conspired to derail the band's fourth album. "It felt like savagery," says Rodriguez-Lopez, who buried the board in an effort to undo the curse. They endured power outages, studio floods, the engineer's nervous breakdown and tracks disappearing while recording in L.A. The duo used the spirits' messages in the lyrics and fed off their energy. "It didn't affect the music so much as the expression of the music," he says. "The concept was to make a more aggressive, vital record."

"Aberinkula," "Wax Simulacra" and "Tourniquet Man" have the staccato guitar and drum blasts of primal punk, and all come in under three minutes. "I rediscovered Bad Brains and the Germs," Rodriguez-Lopez says. No worries: There are still plenty of proggy interludes, and most songs are still five or six minutes. "That's a lot shorter for us," says Rodriguez-Lopez. "They don't have as much as what other people call 'meandering' and what I call 'mood-building.'"

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Song Stories

“1999”

Prince | 1982

“I don’t consider myself a great poet,” Prince told Rolling Stone. “I just know I’m here to say what’s on my mind.” In the case of the apocalyptic party anthem “1999,” he was worried about then-president Ronald Reagan’s foreign policies. The song’s melody is based on a riff borrowed from the Mamas and Papas’ “Monday, Monday,” and Prince originally envisioned the first verse with three-part harmony but later split the vocals between himself and members of the Revolution. Because Warner Bros., with whom Prince was locked in a contractual battle, owned the original’s masters, Prince rerecorded the song and appropriately released that version in 1999.

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