Tommy Giles Rogers, Jr. is talking to his three-year-old son when he answers my phone call from his Southern California home. “Daddy has to make a phone call, okay?” he coos. “I love you.” When the singer isn’t growling for his band, Between the Buried and Me, creating music for his solo project or writing film scores, this is his life.

But right now, even though enjoying a break at home, he’s here to talk about his music. More specifically, Coma Ecliptic—Between the Buried and Me’s seventh studio album. Like all of the prog-metal outfit’s records, this one revolves around an interesting story: A man who puts himself into a coma in order to journey through his past lives, searching for a better world. With an open admiration for the Twilight Zone and David Lynch, Tommy chats with Myspace about the concept behind the album and why it might be BTBAM’s best work yet.

What have you been up to lately? You guys have had some free time.

I’ve just been home, spending time with my girlfriend and my son. Just being a dad—that’s really all I do at home unless I’m working on music. After this record I made a point to take some time off just because I’ve been pretty non-stop creatively and needed a breather mentally.

You’ve referred to Coma Ecliptic as a new life for Between the Buried and Me. Talk to me about that.

I think with us, we’ve been around for over a decade now, and I think what keeps us motivated is pushing ourselves to try new things—that’s kind of how it’s always been from day one. I feel like right from the beginning, when we started writing this record, it felt like something a little different. It felt really right and the writing process went by fast for us. I’m excited with how it all turned out. I don’t know if it’s a new beginning but it feels like the most logical step for us. I think our biggest fear was to release The Parallax again—just write another record that sounded like the last one. We wanted to change it up and I’m really happy with the outcome. It was a fun record to write and I think it’s a fun record to listen to. You can hear the passion and the work we put into it, and I think that’s important.

Also the whole story behind it—you’re basically transporting your listener to a whole different world.

Yeah, I wanted to create a story that really fit well with our music. Because our songs are so different from each other and they go in so many different directions I really wanted to open myself up to creating a story that could change at a split second or could take you to a really weird place if need be. That was helping me not have horrible roadblocks when writing. We’ve done the concept thing before and sometimes you do get a little stuck.

How did you come up with this story?

When we started we knew we wanted to come up with another concept record—it feels right for us right now and The Parallax went so well for us creatively. I wrote a few story ideas and this was probably the third or fourth one and it really worked. The music is super dark. Basically the way I thought of it was, if I were to write a mini-series, what would I want to write? I’m very visual when I write lyrics. I’m super obsessed with The Twilight Zone and David Lynch and all that. I love the feeling those older episodes of The Twilight Zone give you—the tales of the unknown and the characters not all there, and everything being a dream or something other than what they thought it was. It just felt right.

With a story this elaborate, did you have the lyrics written before the music or vice versa?

Music always. We kind of approach every record the same. We never sit down and say, “This record has to do this or this.” We all just kind of writing on our own and emailing riffs or sections to each other to see how we all are feeling...We spend an extreme amount of time to get the songs where they end up. Since Colors, we record as we write. So we can take home a copy of the record so we can be like, Okay this doesn’t work at all or something’s missing here or this doesn’t feel right, and we continually comb over each song until it feels right. It’s a lot of work but it’s great because by the time we go into the studio we know exactly what’s going to go on the record and it makes the recording process so smooth for us. Recording’s fun now because we get all of the bullshit out of the way. We just really work well together, and I think you can hear that in our music.