New Drummer, Same Old Curse: Omar Rodriguez-Lopez on The Mars Volta - by Carl Gouldson - Lead guitarist and co-creator of The Mars Volta, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, feels that it’s now easier to relate to himself and to the world around him since he finished mastering Bedlam last year. Life has become lighter for him and the rest of the group — well, gradually it has, once the album was no longer able to escape. The rest of the band is already down the street at MTV awaiting their live appearance, but back at the hotel, in a room filled with Victorian furniture and artwork, Omar stares through tinted yellow t-shades as he goes over his thoughts on religion, the new album, Toronto and Thomas Pridgen. “We don’t have an agenda — we have the album,” he says in response to my question about the meaning of some of the new material. “For me, the new album is the old album. That’s already seven months ago now,” he says, already frustrated. “What I’m thinking about now is the new one — number five — that I’m working on now. That’s where I’m at.” He hasn’t even listen to a copy of Bedlam yet. It’s a process that takes years for him, to finally go back to evaluate and understand his work. For now, it’s therapy and self-exploration. “You always want to divorce yourself from your last experience. Why would you re-live that same thing twice? Like when I made Francis, I wanted to get as far away from Deloused as possible,” almost childishly gesturing wildly, sitting forward, recoiled until he raises the palms of his hands and falls back into the couch, “And it doesn’t mean that I don’t love those records; it’s just such an absurd notion, you know? We need to keep moving.” Last year while touring with the Red Hot Chili Peppers the band picked up an Ouija Board they began referring to as 'The Soothsayer'. They began putting together material for the new album with answers and messages that came from the board, but when they started to write, technical difficulties, sickness and personal tragedy made the group consider scraping the record all together. Eventually they became convinced there was a curse within the material working against them. This all sounds like something out of a Sheridan Le Fanu novel, so I cock a grin the first time mention it. He leans forward, “It was just fucking insane because of the curse and the spiritual aspect of it, which some people don’t understand or believe in given their upbringing and culture,” the grin fades, “but when you have that looming over you and it’s that dark and it’s that powerful, you feel like there’s no escape. It’s very much like an addiction because it’s only when you come down that you can finally see how out-there you were.” A sense of perseverance within the group and an instinctual desire to overcome his personal and literal demons inspired him to finish. There’s no misinterpreting the relationship between the art and the artist. He describes his music as his way of relating to himself, and those around him, and says it was nothing out of the ordinary for him to place Thomas Pridgen on a warm-up kit in front of 20,000 people in Ohio last year to “converse” with the rest of the band. Pridgen had never so much as met the group before hand and played the entire set. Perhaps his means are unorthodox, but the introduction to ‘Wax Simulacra’ is the end. Enough said. “We’ve found our missing piece… after years of having someone in the band who didn’t want to be there it’s such a breath of fresh air to get someone interested in what we’re doing.” He went on to describe the band’s experience with Jon Theodore as a generally negative one in comparison to what they’ve shared with Pridgen, who is praised as a much more versatile member of the band. Theodore, he continued, was unhappy with everything from parts that were written for him to even the album artwork. To purists comparing these two is going to be like comparing George III to the Pope in Dublin, so the extent of my editorial deviation will be to say only that Pridgen must have killed it in Ohio because he’s given free reign on the album. And that he killed it in Toronto last month when they played just about half of Bedlam to a crowd they described as mellow in comparison to the rest of the tour. But Omar blames it on the cold. He’s humble and acts like it’s the first time he’s heard it when I describe the influence he’s had on progressive music over the past 15 years as we stand up to leave. He’s been waving his road manager off for the past half hour but they’re ready to go to MTV Canada, and no one wants to make an enemy of Globemedia. On the way out he apologizes; he’s never felt fulfilled or happy with the way he comes off in interviews. “It’s strange because we’re being asked to describe something that’s so internal and you want to find the right words so you come up with your own metaphors or your own sayings to paint a picture, but it’s never quite clear.”