Dailor, a sardonic, perpetually straight-faced blond guy, looked to his childhood for inspiration: He says his first step-dad was a druggie who hit and choked him, his mom, and his sister, Skye. His mom sang in a cover band that specialized in Rush; Stepdad was the drummer. "I was coming home from school, and my mom was doubled over on the fuckin' carpet looking for coke," says Dailor'
'The worst of it came when Dailor was 15 and already playing in his first band, Maniacal Rage. His sister, who had always been defiant in the face of the abuse ("She was always getting the real brunt of the stuff because she would just be up in the dude's face, like 'Fuck you!'") had a humiliating encounter with some bullies one day. She went home and took a lethal dose of painkillers from her mother's drawer.
Something inside Brann broke when he found out. "I let out this giant scream, my knees buckled, and I fell down," he recalls. "So that's the crack in the sky, that's the reason the album's called Crack the Skye. It's for that moment you find out someone close to you is gone.
"One night, Dailor dropped acid and went to the cemetery: "She was freshly buried, and I tried to dig and get in there with her, and take the fucking tomb off." The Skye track "The Czar" includes the line "I see your face in constellations." "Thats from me laying in the dirt and staring up at the stars and seeing her face, and knowing that she was telling me to stop." After that, he spent a month in a mental institution. "When I listen to Crack the Skye, and it gets to certain spots, it kills me. I don't even know why I did that to myself. It's just what came out. It needed to be written.""
