Political apathy frustrates Trail of Dead songwriter

By JOHN BENSON

VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT

You can’t underestimate the power of not giving a ... well, um, you can guess what.

Tupac sang about it, Eminem backed him up and now Conrad Keely, singer and multi-instrumentalist of post-rock act …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead, has recorded an album filled with apathy. The new album is the brilliant “So Divided.”

However, in order to fully understand what’s going on with the songwriter, we must go back to the band’s last studio effort, 2004’s “Worlds Apart.” Mired in his own ennui, which isn’t too far removed from self-pity, Keely is still distraught regarding the grandiose “Worlds Apart,” which was a follow-up to the band’s promising 2002 major label debut, “Source Tags & Codes.” As for “Worlds Apart,” the meticulously produced and politically pointed album received favorable press (even Playboy liked it) but in the end, it was marginally received by the group’s fan base. The emotionally draining experience had taken its toll on the New York City resident.

“I’m just concerned about how I feel about the big picture of music,” Keely said. “I’ve come to question its relevance and its importance. I don’t think that music is changing people’s outlook. These days, I look around and see a lot of music being used almost as a form of denial that things are really serious in the world and people would rather drink and party than actually deal with some of these issues.”

Granted, there’s a certain amount of naiveté and ego associated with the notion of changing the world one song at a time, but you can’t help but feel there’s some legitimacy to Keely’s fight. 

“I came out of a tradition of people that were really politically conscious — Fugazi, Nirvana, all of these people really cared a lot about things,” Keely said. “Now who are we looking it? We’ve got Wolfmother? What the (expletive) do they sing, ‘Woman?’ I don’t know. I don’t get that. I don’t get what The Strokes are singing about.

“It just doesn’t make any sense to me at all. I’ve completely lost touch with these people that I’m supposed to regard as my colleagues or my peers. To me, they’re totally way off track.”

As off track as the band’s world may seem, Keely’s songwriting, evident on “So Divided,” is as sharp and tuneful as ever. While song titles such as the title track, “Naked Sun,” “Wasted State of Mind” and “Sunken Dreams” depict his fragile mind-set, the material found among the album’s 11 tunes hearkens back to an early underground ’90s scene, before Cobain’s angst split the alternative rock atom.

On the surface it may seem like an oversimplification to say Keely made “Worlds Apart” for the fans and “So Divided” for himself, but that’s exactly the case. And Songwriting 101 dictates artists are doomed to fail when writing for anyone other than themselves in mind.

For now, Keely is hoping the band’s stage presence is something new. Northeast Ohio fans can decide for themselves when the band performs Wednesday at the Grog Shop. 

“What we do live now is so different from what we did before,” Keely said. “For the first three records, I didn’t care whether it sounded good or not. I was just more interested in having a really crazy live show, and so now I’m waiting to see whether we can make ourselves sound good live.”