Songfacts®:

• The Texas band ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of The Dead's seventh album, Tao of the Dead, is a two-part record, each side with a specific musical tuning. Part I, in the tuning of D, was recorded in just 10 days with Chris "Frenchie" Smith at the Sonic Ranch in El Paso, Texas, and is divided into 11 tracks. "We wanted to record it fast - really fast," vocalist Conrad Keely told Spin magazine as to why they laid it down so quickly. "Many of our records have been painful to make and I didn't want that experience again. I wanted to have fun. That approach made the whole record sound more spontaneous, fresh, and quick to deliver. There's no waiting around - [the sound] is immediate."
• Part II, in the tuning of F, was recorded with former producer Chris Coady in upstate New York and is an epic 16-minute track broken up into five movements. The lyrics for Part II are drawn from Tao Te Ching, a classic Chinese philosophy book penned in the 6th century BC. "It was just happenstance, actually," Keely told Spin magazine. "We were working on lyrics in the studio and usually studios have a stack of poetry books to inspire people. For some reason, this studio didn't have any, but they did have a copy of the Tao Te Ching!"