New SG Interview: And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead0

by Jay Hathaway

“I always design intending it to be 12 inches.”
-Conrad Keely

Over the past five years, Austin rockers … And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead have broken from Interscope, put out a series of increasingly challenging and complex albums, and started operating under their own imprint, Richter Scale Records. It’s been a tough ride for Trail of Dead, but it’s led them to their new LP, Tao of the Dead, which came together more easily than any record the band had ever done before. They finished it in just ten days.

Tao of the Dead is Trail of Dead’s 7th full-length effort, featuring a slimmed-down four-person lineup of founding Trail members Conrad Keely and Jason Reese, lead guitarist Aaron Ford, and Midnight Masses frontman Autry Fulbright. They recorded the album in two parts, each with a different producer. Part I consists of 11 separate tracks, while part 2 is a continuous 16-minute track with six distinct movements. The Tao Te Ching, a classic Chinese text that dates back to the 6th century BC, provided a name for the record and the lyrics for part 2.

Trail’s Conrad Keely is a visual artist as well as a musician — his striking drawings appear on the band’s album covers — and he’s releasing the beginning of a graphic novel along with Tao of the Dead. Listeners will have to draw their own connections between Keely’s steampunk-tinged sci-fi story and Trail’s music.

We talked to Keely and Fulbright about the making of Tao of the Dead, the influence of the Tao Te Ching, and Keely’s new comics project.

Read our exclusive interview with Conrad Keely and Autry Fulbright on SuicideGirls.com.