Friday, April 13, 2007
I've been getting a lot of people asking me are the rumors true, is ...Trail of Dead going to break up? Yes, it's true, the band will break up, eventually. Unless they can find a drug that will keep us alive forever, like the one Keith Richards takes (I believe you have to snort dead people's ashes). Are we breaking up anytime soon? No. Sorry to disappoint you. That means, for all those people who've asked for our autographs, they won't be worth anything for a long time yet, so keep your day job.
I've also been getting a lot of people asking me (actually, not really a lot - maybe one or at the most, two, and one of those was my mother), "When are you going to write something for the news, or post a forum update?" The answer is, maybe soon. Sooner than you know.
I recently moved to New York City. City of sin, city of boxes and newspapers, city of loud conversations everyone can hear, city of skylines and clotheslines and coke lines and traffic lines and dole lines. I think I was expecting New York to be a big change, but I suppose if you've spent the last seven years on and off of tour busses, nothing comes as a surprise anymore. Mogadishu, maybe, that would be a surprise, or Ulaanbaatar. But New York? No. Not so much, unless you find crazy people ranting to their imaginary comrades particularly shocking.
There are only three things I miss about Austin. One is, of course, my friends and family (those could be counted separately I suppose). The other are my favorite hangouts, like Emo's and Casino El Camino, and Ruby's, and back yard barbeques (again, I could count each of those separately). But the third thing, the thing I miss the most, is all my friends and family hanging out at my favorite hangouts, together. You see, in New York it is pretty much next to impossible to expect to find all your friends all together in one place, all doing the same thing. Some live in Manhattan, others live in Queens, others live as far off as New Jersey or Cobble Hill (which is really frightening). And most of them, because of this, don't know each other, they just happen to know you. Ironically most people agree with me about this fact, that "community" as we knew it in our small towns is hard to come by in the big city. But, true to city folk, they will readily agree with you but do little to change this fact. They've learned to accept it, in the same way they accept rude service people and loud traffic, the same way they accept adrenaline and constant stress. Will I learn to accept it? I don't know. If I don't, I'll either try to change it, or I'll leave.
Of course there are a few things I don't miss. Mainly, driving. Driving in Austin is a necessary evil that grows increasingly more hazardous year after year. In New York, don't even bother.
Oh, I suppose you want me to talk about the band. Well, we're working on composing songs for a new record. And we're planning another trip to Europe because it's fun, and another trip around the States, not because it's fun, but simply to keep our American booking agent happy.
Oh, and another thing people have been commenting on is how atrocious our latest video is. I'd like to address this issue right now:
Firstly, we had absolutely nothing to do with the video for Naked Sun.
We were sent this treatment before our last American tour. I read the treatment and I thought it was stupid. I told our managers and our label "I think this treatment sucks". Two weeks later, while on tour, I was sent a rough edit of a finished version of the video made from the treatment I thought was horrible. And we sat around and watched it and we all thought it was horrible. I jokingly suggested that one way to improve this video would be to have a shot of us sitting in a room watching the video on a television, laughing, and throwing things at the television. This never got done.
My favorite thing about the video is that we aren't actually in it, and so our disassociation with its complete lameness is punctuated.
As for the director of this worthless piece of crap, we never had a single conversation with this person. They never once called and asked "What is your vision for this song, what do you think of this treatment, what do the lyrics mean to you?" I partly suspect that she was told we liked the treatment, either by our label or by our managers, or some other nameless middleman who I wasn't aware of whose job it is to befuddle and confuse the music industry. But the fact still stands that she expressed no interest in consulting the band as to their thoughts and opinions of a video for their music, which I consider a grotesque breech of ethics, and harkens back to the dark periods before the 60's where artists were not in control of their advertising, promotion or even their public image, but were at the whim of the record industry and their cronies.
Blame is easy to throw around, but it would be unfair of me not to take partial responsibility myself. The truth is, I can't stand making videos. After the fiasco of trying to direct Relative Ways, to the complete strangeness of Rest Will Follow, I've completely lost interest in the medium, and any hope in using it as a vital way to express our vision artistically. To me, videos have become more an industry farce than anything. At one time they affected change and generated profit, now they appear to be shallow indulgences in image and fashion, now more than ever. In fact, arguably the most popular videos are those made for little or no money by amateurs hosting for free on You Tube, whose work often directly ridicules mainstream video culture.
At the end of the day, does it really matter? I seriously doubt it. In fact, as awful as this video might appear to me now, it might one day be looked back upon like all the many disasters this band has faced, as something to be laughed at, a humorous episode that seemed serious at the time but really had little more than anecdotal significance in the long run.
Anyway, to keep all of you thinking, I just watched a documentary called "The Great Global Warming Swindle":
http://www.channel4.com/science/microsites/G/great_global_warming_swindleI'd be curious to see what people thought about it. Sort of a different perspective than the current popularly-held belief. You can find this documentary on torrent sites.
Conrad Keely
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