Divide And Conquer - ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead

When recalling Trail of Dead's unscheduled extra day in New Orleans volunteering for the Red Cross during the band's current North American tour, Jason Reece sounds almost embarrassed by the fact that one of his own songs sound-tracked his experience of the still pervasive desolation caused by Hurricane Katrina 15 months ago. "'Swept away but oh, not lost," croaks the Trail of Dead songwriter/multi-instrumentalist, as we catch up with him in Phoenix, Arizona before laughing at himself and apparently at the absurdity that a song can come close to embodying the tragedy he witnessed and the unsettling brew of emotions it stirred up in him.
  
"We went through miles and miles of desolation," says Reece. "And New Orleans is a place where we hung out a lot - it's only eight hours away from (Trail of Dead's hometown) Austin - and you can tell that it's lost maybe one tenth of the previous population. You can just feel it. I didn't see any street performers this time, I didn't see any of the people who used to hang out and read tarot decks and stuff like that. A lot of the culture that made New Orleans what it is, is gone. Sure, the most annoying aspects of it still remain, I mean you still get drunk frat boys driving in from Houston to come and drink in the French quarter - they're still there. But where are those Dixieland bands that used to walk down the street and just set up on the side walk?" 

His friends in the New Orleans band, Quintron and Ms Pussycat, struggled to deal with the devastation and provided an all-too-familiar small-scale picture of a band having to re-evaluate themselves in the aftermath of hardship. "They had their basement flooded, they had this whole compound that they used to work out of, it was almost like an art collective.  And that's definitely having to be returned to its previous state.  I think it's going to be interesting. When you wipe the slate clean like that, when mother nature does, we're given the opportunity to remodel and create.  When people undergo this type of adversity, sometimes it serves more to strengthen their resolve than to wreck their spirit." 

By this point in the conversation Reece's personal experience in Trail of Dead is becoming an increasingly clear subtext to his discussion of adversity.  In fact, he may as well be talking about the depression and insecurity the band experienced after their fourth album, ‘World's Apart’ sold barely half what their breakthrough album, ‘Sources Tags & Codes’ sold.  World's Apart was an ambitious, and often overwhelming call for political and cultural change, and when it became clear that few people cared, the band couldn't help taking it personally. "We were trying very hard when we made that record," Reece says.  "And when you try hard and don't succeed, you feel a kind of futility in putting that much effort into something again." 

The frustrating imbalance between effort and reward is starkly apparent in Reece's disenchantment with all but a few aspects of touring.  "I don't know if you've ever taken a road trip across America," he says, "but it's easily one of the most boring countries you'd ever have to travel through - it's homogenous, it all looks the same, and it's not particularly culturally rich either. (Touring) can be exciting and it can be enjoyable, but I mean, come on - when you turn thirty and you've been doing it forever, you're reminded of the fact that it's kind of like camping in the boy scouts. It's not something that you think you're going to spend your adulthood doing." 

As much as his dissatisfaction has you instinctively reaching for the world's smallest violin, it becomes clear that behind the gruff exterior there's a more vulnerable appreciation for the kind of life where road trips and camping count as negative analogies. In fact, the travelling-around-with-your-mates aspect of the tour is paradoxically what Reece finds most refreshing.  Both socially and musically, the Trail of Dead, the Blood Brothers, the Brothers and Sisters, and the Celebration, according to Reece, have bonded to the point where they inspire each other and that seems to go a long way in soothing any existential gloom. "This tour specifically is going to breed a lot of ideas," he enthuses. "What the music from the next record could be like, could definitely be inspired by having played with [those three bands]."