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EXCLUSIVE NEW DOWNLOAD + INTERVIEW: ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead - Bells Of Creation
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Though some of them recently re-located from Austin to New York City, ...And You Know Us By The Trail Of Dead will always sound like a Texan band, if only because their music is as mammoth and indignant as the Lone Star State herself. Over five albums and as many EPs and singles, they've perfected a towering brand of rock music with skyscraper-huge guitars and drums that sound like they're loaded with C4. In early 2009 the band will release a yet-untitled album they've been working on for the past year, an album they recorded with producers Mike McCarthy, Frenchie Smith, and Chris Coady that will be their first for their own Richter Scale imprint. A four-track collection of songs from those sessions were released as the Festival Thyme EP in October, and "Bells Of Creation" is the first song from that EP, which sounds like The Who if they'd decided to write about epic viking battles instead of pinball wizards. The band have graciously hooked up an exclusive download of the track for the next SEVEN DAYS so make sure to grab this one right now. Also hit the break to read a chat we had with frontman Corad Keeley about the song and how it was inspired by Mormonism, School Of Seven Bells, and a hymn Keeley heard as a youngster.
Sounds like: The Who, The Velvet Underground, The Secret Machines
Exclusive Download: ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead - Bells Of Creation
...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead's RCRD LBL Page
You guys are working on a new record, right?
We're pretty much done with it. I think it's getting mastered today. Yea. It's over!
How long have you guys been working on it?
A year.
Wow.
Yea, I know. It's crazy.
Did you do the whole thing in New York?
No, we did a bunch of it in Austin.
What took so long?
I think going back and forth a long time, lately it was just mainly about getting the mixing right. And we weren't happy with the final mixes that we had to have, we wanted Chris [Coady] to do some, but he was in Australia for six weeks so we had to wait for him to come back.
So these songs are probably pretty old now, I guess.
Well, I started writing them about two years ago. We've been playing them live and stuff, I mean none of this is unusual as far as my experience with how music goes. This is kind of how it always is. I wish it could go faster. I wish we could make albums like The Velvet Underground & Nico and record it in a day. These days, the complexity recording, although supposedly made easier by digital, is actually far more complicated.
So tell me about how you wrote "Bells Of Creation".
Well, I wrote it after I saw a band, a friends band. We're friends with the guys from Secret Machines, we've toured with them before, and Ben from Secret Machines left to start his own band called School Of Seven Bells. And the show that I went to see them for the first time was really inspiring and [I was] really into what they were doing.
Where was the show?
I don't think that venue is around anymore, it closed. It was on Ludlow, just off Delancey on the Lower East Side. It was one of those clubs that just closed in the last year, you know a bunch of clubs were bought out by rent. So, I had that kind of sound in my head and I was inspired by that. The association of "Bells" being there, I named the song I was writing, inspired by that show, after a hymn, called "Bells Of Creation" that we used to sing when I was in school back in England. Every morning the school would have assembly, and all the kids would gather in the assembly hall and we'd all sing hymns. And that was one of my favorite hymns, "Bell Of Creation." It was just singular, "The bell of creation."
And then, I hadn't really had a subject matter for it, I just had the melody and the idea for the title, really. Then I saw this program on Mormonism, it was on American Experience, a two-part series on the Mormons. And I'd just been reading the book called, "Under The Banner Of Heaven," which is a pretty scathing denouncement of their religion. But the PBS show is much more unbiased. You know, PBS, they kind of see both sides to things, so it was a bit more fair. I mean, it didn't dispel the fact that religion itself is pretty absurd when you come down to what people base religions upon, it's about as believable as The Chronicles Of Narnia. But, I did like the idea of how when he received his prophecy, he heard a "theophany," which I guess was the word for just the angelic choir and the idea of music from the heavens. And that's always been interesting to me, just the idea of how music can transcend our particular world because the basis of music in sacred geometry and mathematics would lead you to assume that the music that we make here on earth might actually be quite similar to the music that is made on other planets. Just because the rules of the physics behind music are actually fundamental to reality. We didn't invent the rules, we we just discovered them.
Since there were already songs from the record that dealt with prophecy, the idea of a prophetic message being channeled from wherever, that kind of fell in. That's the whole story behind that song. It's also the only song that we've ever mentioned the word "Texas" in. And we're from Texas.
What kind of prophecies are you talking about on this record? Any tie into the changes of our election on November 4th?
I don't think that was in my mind. Since I wrote these songs so long ago, I don't even think I knew who was running for president then. It had more to do with I think it was more brought on by the fact that...I love the History Channel. I watch it all the time. There's just so much programming these days about things like the Mayan prophecy, and the prophecies of Nostradamus and things like that. I'm not saying that I believe in prophecies or disbelieve in prophecies, they're just kind of there. But they're obviously really important to the human imagination. In every single culture, there's been the idea that someone could have a vision of the future and predict something that's about to happen and it comes to pass or we're still waiting for it to happen. It really shapes the whole tone of our popular culture. I download these lectures sometimes and just listen to college lectures from different universities and there was one that was just about how much a part of our culture the concept of Armageddon is. Society believes in an "end time". So many presidents, so many people in power...this idea has motivated them. Like Ronald Regan was convinced...he was trying to like stop Armageddon from happening. So, it was pretty interesting. Those were the thoughts going through my mind. I don't think they were bleak, I don't think they were negative, I'm certainly not afraid of the future in that sense. It's more just the idea that's there, that's something that we all think about and want to know. It's just apart of our desire to know.
How do you see yourself as a rock band fitting into that though? It's something so simple and basic and then trying to incorporate these huge, broad ideas...
Well you know when I pick subject matter, it always stems from the sound of the music. I listen to the music and think, "What does this song make me feel? What does this song make me say?" And in that sense I'm not trying to write the song, I'm trying to let the song write itself. So, with "Bells Of Creation" I was trying to picture what the song said to me. You know, the idea of the song sounding like it could be the theme for a mystical experience that someone could have. And one of the other songs on the record that's really heavy and Armageddon-like, launching elephants on the oncoming army of horsemen, that one I definitely had to make the lyrics sound apocalyptic and scary, just for the song's sake. But, I don't think of what we do as something basic and simple. I know there is something basic and simple about the rock formula, not just being amplified equipment and stuff like that. But I never try and let that limit me. The idiom in which we write, there are so many possibilities that are still to be explored. I look at it as much like a symphony or classical music as rock music.
Yea you're music certainly incorporates epic arrangements and whatnot.
Yea. We're also greatly inspired by film too. [It's] cinema for us, we're trying to conjure up images and stories.
You're also an artist, do you ever write music based on what you've been painting or vice-versa?
I never have but I'm starting to. I can't tell where one idea begins, whether it comes from an image I'm working on or whether it comes from the song going into the image. But, on this record, the artwork that I've been doing for the record is definitely tied into several things that are going on into the lyrics and thinking the overall theme. And I'm trying to develop a fictional story around the lyrics and images on the record, which I may or may not include here on the record or maybe just online or something. I wasn't intentionally doing that, it was that just a friend of mine, looking at the artwork, started coming up with these ideas, suggested that I develop that, the idea of a story. It just kind of came to be. I wasn't trying to push it, I was just kind of letting it work its own magic.
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