Lost Songs, the eighth album from …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of The Dead, is, in a word, intimidating. Though the Austin rockers are known (and revered) for their volatile live shows and haltingly candid lyrics, Lost Songs is a dense volume that requires an open mind and ample time for reflection in order to digest the record’s intellectual subject matter alongside its musical counterparts. Below, Conrad Keely walks us through the creation of the record, the evolution of …Trail of the Dead’s songwriting process and how Lost Songs has reaffirmed their ability to speak their minds through an unstoppable wall of noise.
Paste: You touch on a lot of themes on Lost Songs, from Game of Thrones to political discourse to disenchantment within the music industry. Did you have a direction in mind when you wrote the record?
Conrad Keely: Not really—we kind of allowed the creative process to dictate itself. If anything, our only goal was to do it quickly and allow the spontaneity of the writing to determine the direction it went. I don’t think about what we’re doing as something different from what we’ve done before, as much as we’re trying to evolve in what we do and grow as composers and writers, and to frame and address what we’re going through personally in our lives, in the media or what’s going on in the world right now. Because we’re making the songwriting process a really quick one, sometimes these things just come out on paper. Most of the lyrics were written five minutes before we sang the rough vocal track on the demos, and they didn’t change that much from the originals that we wrote right on the spot. All of the writing for the music came really fast, so fast so that we didn’t have much time to think about the direction it was going. We just let it carry us through the process.
Paste: That sounds like the definition of an organic creative process.
Keely: Yeah, I think that approach was something we learned from Tao of the Dead and something we wanted to continue. We wanted to just let it flow. If something’s not working, go to the next thing; if you let it flow, most of the things you try just work somehow. It was a really collaborative writing experience. We were all coming up with ideas together, which is a lot different compared to how I wrote in the past.
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