It is a Friday afternoon. Outside someone is puking and being hauled away by paramedics because they drank too much jungle juice. Inside, I am on the phone chatting with one of the masterminds behind ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead, playing a sold-out show at the First Unitarian Church on Friday. Who are you and why did you call us? My name is Jason Reece and I'm in this band called ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead and we are a band that is here to ruin your life. How are you going to that? By stealing all of your women... and by being this caustic resin in your face. We're going to eat your face too. Your live performances have been called "incendiary." When you play in Los Angeles have you ever worried that your audience will melt? They won't melt -- they will become stronger because they will become part of us. We will actually go up in flames together and it will be like a rising phoenix coming up from the ashes. Tell us a little bit about signing to Interscope. How did that change your band? It has made us stronger and wiser, sort of an invincible machine, ready to pillage every village, ready to appropriate and take every culture over and just make it Trail of Dead culture. There will be no other culture. Just our band and we will dictate what you do and what you think. What will the parties be like in this culture? Well, obviously they are going to be hedonistic -- a lot of sex orgies and drugs, but that would only go on at night. By day everyone would have to practice martial arts and become invincible fighters, proficient in the art of the crane and tiger styles. Would you force us to be on any sort of diet? Yeah, the diet at night would be PCP, crack and copious amounts of cocaine -- but during the day you would be a vegan... well I guess some people eat meat, so they could get their meat from either tofu or the cows that we slaughter. Do you consider labelmate Limp Bizkit a primary influence or simply a secondary influence? Well you know, Fred has penned all of our lyrics so I would have to say that they are definitely a primary influence. We've hung out with Fred quite a bit and he has a lot of good ideas. He has sold 10 million records. Could we live without such a spiritual character as Fred? He is just such a sexy man. He's got a big dick too. What kind of changes would have to occur in the world for you to sell 10 million records? I think selling 10 million records would just be fucking easy. The only reason we haven't done it is because we are trying to keep our cult status. We want to be like Sonic Youth. We want to be cool with kids. We don't want to sell out to the man. We're not going to write some pop hits. Goddamn it, fuck that man, I hate pop music.
So who is your favorite pop singer? When it comes down to pop music it changes day to day. Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Mick Jagger were great pop singers in the past. Justin Timberlake is pretty fucking damn cool right now. Shit, I'd party with that dude. Him and Britney [Spears]. We would have a fucking orgy... an orgy of death with blood dripping all over our bodies. Have you ever watched that movie Angel Heart? Where it has the chicken blood dripping all over their naked flesh while they are fucking. That is going to be our little orgy at the Playboy Mansion and after that we will set that shit on fire. You have been getting a lot of buzz lately. Would you consider yourselves trendy? Yeah man, I'm into trendy shit. [In order to determine his trendiness we administer a quiz from Cosmo online. According to the quiz, Jason is "totally trendy. He should really be a doctor because he has his finger on the pulse of fashion. His uncanny ability to tell what's hot from what's not makes him a fashionista."] Tell us about your new EP. We were just trying to write in a different way and try out new things. It's not going to be our next record. Whenever you buy an ep it's usually pretty half-assed. I thought that we actually put a lot of time into it. Do you have any sense of what the next record is going to be like? I just know that the next record has to be way the fuck better than the last one. That's the way we always approached our music. We've always forced ourselves not to rest on our laurels and move on in someway or another. I want it to be a record that is going to rock the shit out of you and yet take you to a place that is tranquil. I always like bands that are diverse in the way they approach their music. You recently got back from a tour with the Queens of the Stone Age. By all accounts they some of the most debaucherous rock stars around. Were you able to hold your own with them? They live up to the reputation. We go toe to toe with them on that shit. Nothing phases us. It was like, "Guys, if you're going to take it up a notch then we're going to take it up a notch." I don't know what you consider fun or indulgent but we came as close to the rock star clich‚ as I can imagine. But we're a clean band. We don't indulge. We're straight edge. We have the Lord Jesus on our side. Thank you very much. Just to warn you, when we print the interview it will only include the parts about orgies with Justin Timberlake. I think that interviews are silly and in the end people are only interested in reading about bloody orgies and not our philosophy on how we create. In the end, how we create music is just a load of shit. We're boring if we talk about that shit. I'd rather talk about the bloody orgies.
