INSIDE THE ROCKERS STUDIO

Trail of Dead mix their new album, play with unicorns, and talk mortality with NYLON.

When it comes to teenage rebellion, the band …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead doesn’t mess around. Now together for fourteen years, the Austin, Texas group decided late last year to ditch their major label backing. Soon after, they cut ties with their longtime producer. Now in the midst of finishing their sixth album, Trail of Dead’s Jason Reece and Conrad Keely invited NYLON into the studio to check out their new tracks and talk about starting over.

Tell us about the new album—what can listeners expect?
JR: This album has some really lush qualities, and then there are some noisier and heavier things. It will be pretty diverse.

CK: Thematically, a lot of the songs I was working on have to do with family and childhood. The cover art is a portrait of a young boy gazing in wonder at a human skull, which is supposed to represent that moment in childhood when you realize your mortality. I don’t know why that’s a theme…

JR: But it’s not like nu-metal or some emo band that writes about how life is hard. Because there’s a tendency to have that self-pitying thing going on, and it has nothing to do with that. It’s optimistic, intimate portraits of things that have happened in the past. Also, this album is kind of a new thing altogether, just from getting a new producer and doing our own label. So it’s like breaking with conventions and jumping into the unknown and starting up this new thing.

How have these changes affected the music?
JR: We’re not dealing with huge amounts of money. But with smaller budgets you try to get more creative with the money you do have.

CK: Art always thrives under limitations. Whenever there’s an oppressive factor or limitations to what you can do, it forces you to be creative as to how you can achieve the same things that you had when you had fewer limitations.

What was behind the decision to switch producers in the middle of recording this album?
JR: Mike McCarthy was a father figure, a mentor, and he turned against us in a cheap way. He got greedy. There was a point when it bothered us, but now we’re done with it. Because we’re here.

CK: The same thing with the label. There was a point when things were getting really lame at Interscope and I was really pissed off and sick of it. But then once we moved away and had a better situation, I didn’t even think twice about it. The best thing they could have done was treat us that way and let us move on.

More bands are turning to the internet to release digital albums, and you've even had your album leaked online. What’s your feeling on the relationship between the Internet and music?
CK: I think that you have to learn a certain amount of self-sacrifice when you know that your music is going to be accessed and accessible. Once it’s released, it can be distributed freely by whoever wants it. There’s a certain amount of letting go, and then returning to what you think are the real values of what you do. For example, seeing us live is never going away. Same thing with album art—you can’t just download it. And people still ask us for vinyl. It shows that people still like that tangibility.
REBECCA WILLA DAVIS

www.myspace.com/trailofdead



This story was published on August 26, 2008.