…And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead are fast approaching their 20th year as a band, and last year released their eighth full-length Lost Songs.
Prior to their show at SWG3 (on Record Store Day no less), I sat down with spiritual leader and frontman Conrad Keeley to discuss Record Store Day, travelling the world and Game of Thrones.
Today is Record Store Day, have you had a chance to check any Glasgow institutions today?
CK – I don’t really go to any record stores these days, I don’t really pride myself on my record collection.
Book Stores are more for me, my book collection means a lot more, but I have to resist the temptation to carry around more books on tour, I can get a little carried away at times.
We did go to Kelvingrove Gallery and checked out some Albert Moore, Rossetti – 19th Century Victorian art is what I really enjoy.
This is your third time in Scotland in as many years, is this a place you enjoy playing?
Oh sure, we’ve always had great Scottish connections, our old tour manager is from here, and we’re always given a great treatment; particularly with bands like Mogwai.
You guys recently remastered the self-titled record and Madonna, with the former in particular sounding really fantastic as a result, was this something you had wanted to do for a while? Did you have much involvement with it?
Yeah certainly, it was great to re-mix the self-titled, we weren’t actually able to re-mix Madonna because we don’t actually own the master tapes for it – we recorded it “under the radar” of the studio who didn’t know we were doing it, the engineer Mike McCarthy snuck us in late at night.
When they finally found out they wanted to charge us to re-buy the tapes which we couldn’t afford but there are other records I’d really like to re-do Century of Self and re-sequence So Divided.
How would you change So Divided?
I’d put the first song at the end of the album, ha ha.
Lost Songs really returns to that fast-paced, more straight up sound that you guys perfected to some extent on those first two records, was this an intentional decision? Or something of a coincidence?
We never really had any particular intention to “go back” and do anything; it’s always to move forward, and this record really just epitomises how we felt musically – that’s what every record we have ever done has been like.
You recorded your latest album in Germany, how was that experience? Did anything change in the process as a result?
Yeah in Hanover – Casey who recorded it made it have a real Teutonic feel to it and there’s a song, which I think is only on the deluxe edition, called ‘Mountain Battle Song’ that is based on the battle of Teutoburg Forest which happened about half-an-hour away from where we recorded, so it was kind of cool to have that vibe go into it.
Plus we love Germany – it’s a great country.
And you’ve been travelling a lot more between records right? You live in Cambodia now, has that influenced the song-writing process?
Yeah of course, but I mean, everything we do in some way ends up influencing the record.
Obviously for me I have a great passion for travelling and seeing the world, and that really impacts my perspective on things.
Moreover, this really fits well with this particularly politically charged record, did this influence your more straightforward approach this time around, and was that from a specific place?
Yeah I think being in Cambodia did influence the more political influence to this record.
That’s a very politically aware place, many people who expatriate there are very politically aware and active and the politics in tangible there.
And how is the political situation in Cambodia right now?
Well politically, it’s fucked! It’s being run by a bunch of gangsters kind of turning it into a fucked-up capitalist state but it comes from a really culturally rich and fascinating place as it’s the oldest country in that region, oldest civilisation too.
So, it has a lot of promise and potential to really offer something to the world, it just needs to be steered by the right people and I feel like by being there creative types like ourselves can really make a difference there.
Especially after living in New York for five years I just felt like I couldn’t do anything anymore; I was basically just a nobody.
I don’t resent that, New York taught me a lot about working and a lot about who I am but as far as becoming a part of the NYC art scene goes, it’s just a sea of competitiveness.
Whereas places like Cambodia, they need people there to help re-build because so much of that heritage was destroyed by the Khmer Rouge regime.
As well as your more political songs and the ones from your ‘Strange News From Another Planet’ story, one of your annotated lyrics that really intrigued me is your Game of Thrones tribute. What was it about GoT that influenced you to write a song about it?
Yeah well we were watching a lot of Game of Thrones at the time and again, we thought it was pretty political.
It really kind of hit home about how this moralistic whistle-blower *SPOILER ALERT* gets his head cut off despite being the only morally astute character and everyone else, even his children aren’t perfect.
So Game of Thrones felt relevant to themes of the album generally?
Albums tend to just magically unify themselves thematically, at least when we work on them anyway, and it doesn’t really require much effort from ourselves.
To be honest with you, for me writing the music is now the least effort I put into the record now; writing the chapters to the deluxe edition to accompanying the record is where most of my energy goes to nowadays.
Opposition in the lyric writing is almost intuitive and spontaneous and I like it that way.
In the past we really toiled over records, specifically Source Tags, Worlds Apart and So Divided, albums that we really meticulously worked at and I just don’t know if that made them better records.
So, we came into this one (and Tao of the Dead) with the attitude that this is us on a vacation; we’re four friends hanging out and cooking barbeques who happen to be writing some songs at the same time.
Yeah, you guys recorded these two albums relatively quickly right? And you can really feel that energy and it comes across because it’s just the four of you now who are in-tune with each other, is this approach preferable to you right now?
Yeah well you know, it also really suits the economical climate of the time.
We can’t spend half a million dollars in a studio composing any more and to be honest it was pretty ridiculous how we did it back in the day.
It’s nice to be able to keep moving with it; for instance there were three songs on this album that were all tracked in one day, and that never happens for us before, it’s unheard of.
We were really just on fire with this record.
What are you plans after this tour is done? What is the near future for Trail of Dead?
I don’t know really – right now we’re going to go back to Austin and record an EP, but after this tour there are some things coming up in our personal lives, good things; I’m going to be starting a family, so this might be the last bit of touring for a little while.
But we’ll be looking forward to the next record too, I generally start planning the next record right after we finish the previous one.
And if you did park the band here for a while, would you feel you were satisfied with what you’ve achieved so far?
Well I wouldn’t say satisfied as such, I don’t think I’ve ever been satisfied, it’s not really a goal of mine.
I always want to be artistically motivated and striving, if not struggling, for something.
So, my focus right now is to finish my book.
You started that with the previous album right? How is the book coming along?
Yeah that’s right, it’s coming along good, but unfortunately I can’t really work on it on tour, it’s impossible to concentrate on the road, so I really need to get back home and really get into it again.
Plus writing fiction is really intense, you need to step through like a dimension door to really get into that space properly; you really have immerse yourself in that world of the project, so it will take me a while to get back into that universe but when I’m there it seems more real to me than reality, which seems scary because in real life it just seems like I’m in a weird dream.
When it’s all done I plan to release it as it’s own book with illustrations.
You grew up in Olympia, Washington? Did that environment influence you as an artist? I ask mainly because there’s so much amazing music that came out of that town, some that I hear in your music in bands such as Unwound and much of K Record’s output...
…Karp, Bikini Kill, Link, The Melvins always used to come down; that was our musical education… Sleater-Kinney, Beat Happening you know the list goes on.
Was that an inspiring place to be then as a young musician at the time?
It was, but it was also a tough place to live, six months of rain, a miserable and depressed economy, very cliquish and yet the art scene there just thrived.
I went to Evergreen State College that was just this creative mad-house, so it was an amazing time for that, and I don’t think there’s really been a time like that since, that was the pocket of time and we were really lucky to be there to embrace it, but we also left at the right time – 1993.
Words: Adam Turner-Heffer
