By Martin Popoff
"Oh man, it's like the first night, Adam walked up to me and asked me to show him some of our riffs. So I mean, they're totally into it. And we're totally into their band and I mean, we had a f**king great time. Tool for us, if I had a choice, I would go out on the road for the rest of my life with less money, just as long as I could play with Tool. That's how strongly we feel about those guys. The treated us like family. They treated us about everything you could expect from a band. I mean, we've been getting great response from all the bands here, and it's gotten to the point where we don't even understand why people are so nice to us. But with Tool, it's even worse. They were even more... they are such nice guys, I can't even start to explain it. So we really had a great time on the Tool tour. That was the best where we ever did."
On top of coming back to North America for more dates, likely in October, Meshuggah has filled their plate with the following. "Well, at the moment, I'm trying to convince Nuclear Blast to release all our albums on picture disc vinyl, in very limited editions. That's one thing, the old school thing. And we also know we should do a video. So what's up with the band right now is that we land in Sweden on the 10th of September, and then we're not going to have any time off, but we're going to stay at home for I think, five weeks, and during that period of time, we'll be getting our eight-strings, rehearse the new stuff, if we're going out on the road, and, we need to do a video. So that's the news. We don't know which songs; we can go with Perpetual Black Second, Rational Gaze, or Closed Eyes Visuals - those are the top three candidates right now. But we really need a video because we haven't done that for real at any time. We've done like f**k-up videos for fun, but we've never done a real video so we'd like to give that a shot."
And a favourite memory from the Ozzfest tour? "One night, I think it was Detroit, there was a jam, and some guy pulled out a drum kit and a couple of amps, backstage, and people from different bands were playing Metallica covers and everybody was really drunk, and then Kirk, or someone from the Down camp, called James Hetfield up and said 'Hey, listen man, this is what's going on backstage at Ozzfest' and he held up the phone to him and let him hear a couple of Metallica tunes. It's a party but not a frenzy; it's not like everything is exploding all the time, but everybody is hanging out and having a ball."