Pitchfork

Photo by Ryan Muir

…And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead singer/guitarist Conrad Keely probably shouldn't have done this interview when he did. After spending the afternoon on the phone with publicists, I was told that the band was busy finishing something up, and would need a few more minutes. We finally connected, but I was halfway through the chat before Keely let me know that Trail of Dead were at that very moment in the studio, just about an hour away from the completion of the the band’s sixth LP, the follow-up to 2006's So Divided. (The new album will be preceded by the preview EP Festival Thyme, out October 21 on the band's own Richter Scale imprint of Justice Records in America and on Superball Music overseas.)

There's still plenty to be done on the disc before its planned January release. Keely needs to break out the pen and get to work on the album artwork, and the thing doesn't have a title yet. But just about everything else is all set. We spoke with Keely about Trail of Dead's current sound, the benefits of leaving Interscope, working with Yeasayer, and the proper way to make an ambitious record on a shoestring.

Pitchfork: What's the current state of the new album?

Conrad Keely: We've been mixing all week and now we're mastering.

Pitchfork: Have you been done with the recording for a while?

CK: No, we were recording all the way up to the very end, actually. We were recording vocals all the way up until recently. We had the guys from Yeasayer come and sing back-ups on a song, and we had some other back-up singers.

Pitchfork: Seems as though you've been working on this one for a while.

CK: We started it this spring, so, let's see, we've been working on it for about five months. We started right after SXSW, so that would've been March 16 or so. Switching producers was one big snag, I guess, but other than that, the recording part has gone pretty smoothly. Nothing has bogged it down at all.

Pitchfork: What made you decide to switch producers?

CK: Well, we wanted to work with Chris Coady. He's a friend of mine up here. I just like the work that he's been doing. And also, I think his attitudes toward contemporary music and mine are very similar. I think we spoke a common language. And plus, the experiments I was doing with Logic and digital recording, plug-ins and stuff, I think that he was better suited at kind of interpreting my take on that.

Pitchfork: I'm curious about what you might mean by 'common language'.

CK: By common language I mean the vocabulary of music software, because it's kind of a new field, and it's something that is still in development. So it's something that I've taken seriously while I've been composing and using it as a composition tool, and Chris uses it as a recording tool. So when it came to, like, how to make those elements sound good or natural--or how to make them sound very unnatural or completely unique--  I think that we're on the same wavelength.

Pitchfork: How is it making a record in 2008 different from how it was in, say, 1998 when you were making those early ones?

CK: Well, the heavy reliance on Pro Tools I imagine is the biggest. I mean, we started the record on tape, but we didn't end on tape. By then we had already dumped everything onto Pro Tools. There was a point where we had to transport the record in these hard drives. It's kind of nerve-wracking because they're a lot more frail, in a way, than tape. But also, just the kind of tools that are available, the way that when you're going for a sonic idea, the ways in which you go about them digitally are quite different than, you know, recording hard onto tape. You're not worried about takes and stuff so much as you are about comping together different takes. Stuff like that.

Pitchfork: Do you find that having these tools at your disposal makes it easier to make a record?

CK: Well, you know, I think with the decrease in record budgets, [digital recording] has become expected these days. I think it's really the only way to go. Even when it comes down to using samples to replace something like string quartets, obviously you can't replace a proper string quartet, but if you had to, you could at least get some simulacrum of one using samples. It's those types of things that I think necessitate a heavy reliance on digital these days, because you're not having to spend top money on the session musician. Much to the session musician's chagrin. I think they're pretty upset about it.

Pitchfork: You don't have Interscope backing you on this album. Has that changed how this one came together in any way?

CK: We have partners going into this. We have Justice Records, who is our Texas-based label partner, and also a European one [Superball Music]. You know, a record is still expensive to make, but I think this one we made with one-third the budget of our previous record. Maybe even less. Probably less, actually, yeah. Quite a bit less.

Pitchfork: What do you attribute that to?

CK: Necessity. We didn't have a budget. We're not on a major label anymore. But in a way I think that these types of things are ones lots of artists are facing these days. It kind of us forces us to use our creativity to come up with different solutions. So I don't think the limitations are a bad thing when it comes to making music and art. I think that sometimes limitations are really what helps creativity to thrive, you know? We're at the very end of this process. It's kind of amazing to me, it's kind of scary to think that... it's kind of like letting go.

Pitchfork: You must be very close to the end...

CK: Actually we're about an hour.

Pitchfork: Oh, crap, an hour! Now I feel like I'm interrupting something.

CK: The last thing we've gotta do is sequence the record, and that's it.

Pitchfork: Since you're basically looking at the finished product at this point, is there anything holding this one together. Is there a theme or something you can say about it as a total piece?

CK: There are. Well, there are musical motifs that I guess you'll just hear on the record. There are, I guess, certain themes on the record that are, lyrically, maybe it's a bit more metaphysical a record than our previous records have been. I think just the topics... there's a song called "Isis Unveiled" which is named after a book by a Russian mystic [Helena P. Blavatsky--Ed.] from the 1800s that my parents used to own. There's a song about the concept of theophany, which is holy music, or music that you would hear in the after life. The idea of that came to me when I was watching a documentary about the Mormons on PBS. Just the idea that music has a spirit, or divine nature to to it. A lot of philosophers kind of touch upon this, even Isaac Newton and some of the great philosophers who believed in Music of the Spheres, or people that have studied the idea that there is sacred geometry to music. These are the kind of ideas that I was toying with. And even up to today, where there are thoughts on string theory and how the basis of all reality is a vibration. So I think these are thoughts I was thinking of when I was writing. Then there is a second theme of the family... and just our childhood, which ties into the artwork I'm doing for the record.

Pitchfork: Childhood, huh? Any particular reason?

CK: I don't know. There's a song on this album called "Photos of an Only Child", or... actually, we're still toying with the title, but I think it's gonna be something like "Pictures of an Only Child", which is a song that I'd written before we'd even formed the band, this goes back to like, '84. It's just about looking at my photo album and these pictures from when I was a kid, and I'd had it written but it never felt like the right time to record it until this record.

Pitchfork: Do you have a title for the record yet?

CK: Uh, we don't actually. Not yet. We should probably have one in a day or two [laughs]. But at the moment, we still haven't decided. We can get back to you on what it's gonna be.

Pitchfork: Do you have anything that has been sort of tossed around?

CK: Yeah, but nothing too serious. Usually the title is something we leave for the very last minute. It almost feels like we need to have the whole record sequenced and done before we decide what the title is gonna be.

Pitchfork: I read something you said a couple of months ago while you were in the thick of recording that this record was more anthemic than the past ones. Can you elaborate on that?

CK: I don't know. I guess that would be one way of putting it. I think that it's more cohesive as a record than the last two. I think that the songs came from very similar places, whereas the last one I almost felt was like an EP, you know, it was still like songs from all these different ideas, almost pastiches of what songs could be. And this one is far more unified, definitely.

Pitchfork: Are there bigger hooks, bigger choruses? I guess there are always big choruses on Trail of Dead records.

CK: [Laughs] There are some songs of ours that don't have choruses. But we did have a lot of backup singers, and I think that the fat kind of chorus thing kind of made the songs sound anthemic.

Pitchfork: You mentioned working with Yeasayer. Is there a reason you picked those guys?

CK: I loved that record. I loved it. The percussion and the singing, I just thought i was great.

Pitchfork: They're just singing on the record?

CK: Yeah, yeah, unfortunately we didn't have time to have them sing more, otherwise we would have. I think they were up for it, too [laughs]! They seem like they're just... ready to go. But this just happened at the very end of the recording, so we had to get straight back to mixing.

Pitchfork: You touched on this sort of label business you've been going through. Obviously you had problems with Interscope in the past, and now you're forging your own thing with Richter Scale. Does it feel good, liberating?

CK: It does actually. It feels 'hands off', which is what I like. By the end, I think Interscope was too nosy. They were trying to control what we were doing, and always prodding about what stage of the progress... how far along we were. But now we're just kind of doing it ourselves -- we turn in the masters and it gets released. We don't have to, like, pain our people constantly, demanding demos and rough tracks.

Pitchfork: What do you think Interscope wanted with you guys? You don't seem like a band that was gonna sell a ton of records right off the bat with a major.

CK: I think when they signed us, it looked as if the music industry could have gone in one of two directions. And I think it went the pop direction instead of the rock direction. There's always a kind of a back-and-forth in the trends of the music industry. You have the pop trend, and then the rock, punk backlash kind of thing going on. It happens constantly. It's been happening since the 50s. So when they signed us, I think they'd made a lot of money off of hip-hop and urban music, and they had the money to experiment and take risks and stuff on things like that. And I'm glad they did. It was definitely a great opportunity for us. But by the time we left, the music industry, at least on their terms, had taken a turn for the worst, and they were forced to, basically, invest in only the bands that would make a return.

Pitchfork: As I understand it, Justice is distributed in part by Universal, so there still is that sort of connection to the major system, however tentative.

CK: I know, it's ironic. It's Fontana, which is Universal.

Pitchfork: Does that bother you at all?

CK: No, not really, because the things that made Interscope problematic for us were the intrusiveness and the demanding to control how the money was spent. It can be really annoying when you're being told how to spend publicity money or marketing money, which can be expensive when you're being told you need to use a high-caliber photographer, when you think that you could have easily done portraits using a digital camera. That type of thing. And I don't feel like we're having to deal with that at all. In fact, I don't think we're gonna put pictures on this record [laughs].

Pitchfork: You're doing this EP, Festival Thyme, as a sort of preview for the album. Do you think, because of this new situation, you now have the freedom to do this kind of thing? It's coming out on a picture disc, it's limited edition... these are not major label things in 2008, really.

CK: Right, I know. And I like that. We've never had... well, wait, maybe back in the day. It seems like packaging, especially, is something that independent record labels tend to have a lot more freedom and leeway with. I don't understand why that is, maybe it's the limited numbers that they print, but... like vinyl. One of my favorite recent record covers was that Joanna Newsom album Ys, I thought it was great. That painting.

Pitchfork: You guys seem like a band where the visual aesthetic has played a large part in the records, so it seems fitting that you'd be on a label that gives you more leeway with that sort of thing. I mean, a Trail of Dead picture disc sounds very natural to me.

CK: [Laughs] In some ways, I think that the way that mainstream music is these days, and how people listen to records, I don't think that we're going to be one of those mainstream-type bands. I think there was a time when I was convinced that we could have been, but maybe I'm relieved in some way that we didn't really go that direction. That we didn't have to write songs in order to make radio hits or something. And the bands that have gone that direction, I can just see why their music seems compromised because of it. We're still making records for audiophiles, I feel. We're not trying to mix these things so they sound good on a laptop. We're mixing them so they would sound great on a good pair of speakers.

Pitchfork: You have a few shows planned, but you don't have anything resembling a tour coming up that I've heard about. Are you planning on doing a full-on press through the fall?

CK: Not really. Since the record is not done yet, I'll probably be finishing off all of the art work. I'll be spending as much time as I can at home just drawing. It's going to be all ballpoint pen.

Pitchfork: You and [drummer/keyboardist] Jason Reece recently played as the "original lineup" of Trail of dead, which was a duo. How did that come about?

CK: We were asked by a friend who organizes those shows at [NYC club] Santos Party House with Andrew W.K. He'd seen us back in the day, he was from Austin, and he'd seen us as a two-piece, and for the six months that we were a two-piece, the people who saw us really loved that base. When we started adding members, they always asked us, "when are you gonna play another show as a two-piece?" It kind of always annoyed me, because in my mind, the music that I heard had to be played with other instruments. It was big-sounding. But the simplicity of the two-piece, and the energy, the chemistry of us playing as a two-piece, it was so rare, and it was fun. It was entertaining. It was the opposite approach, I suppose, to doing it with the full band. I guess it just depends on how people like to interpret a song, whether it's the simplicity of the song that they love, or the complexity. I'm always being accused of being over-complex [laughs].

Pitchfork: I can see that.

CK: I'm one of those 'more is more' type people. Definitely not 'less is more'. I've never believed in 'less is more' [laughs].

Pitchfork: I saw a set list, and you did all kinds of songs, including quite a few that are pretty bombastic on record. How did they translate?

CK: It was great. We did some on the piano, so when we did "Source Tags and Codes" and one of the songs from the new record, we had never tried that before, just drums and piano, and piano can sound pretty full. I think I tend to play it kind of like it's supposed to be an entire band, percussion and everything.

...Trail of Dead:

11-06 Houston, TX - Warehouse Live
11-07 Dallas, TX - Club Dada
11-08-09 Austin, TX - Waterloo Park (Fun Fun Fun Fest)