Some friends of mine from high school formed a band called Bad Ties. They released a few singles on soundcloud and spotify and managed to get a record deal with a rather prestigious label.
For their first album, they came to me and asked that I put together the cover and I jumped at the opportunity.
They asked for something inspired by old blue tone records from the 60s and 70s and use a photo they had taken of their bassist.
They also asked that I design shirts for them to sell at gigs. Their lyrics tend to skew towards personal experiences particularly in relationships. Sticking with the 60s, I applied a halftone to Marilyn Monroe with a tie on.
I also screen printed the shirts myself so I was able to explore a more subtle delivery. With that in mind, I duplicated the halftone and offset it just a bit. In printing the shirts, I printed the background in red with the foreground in blue. This lent a greater dynamism to the print and ensured that every shirt was guaranteed to be slightly different.
For their second album, titled There Will Be Beauty, There Will Be Violence, I was given carte blanche to do whatever I saw fit. They gave me super 8 footage they had taken in Louisiana and all of the footage possessed a kind of eerie quality to it: lots of blurry shots that were generally washed out.
Concurrently I had been using a film camera quite a bit and had just gone down to a small town with a paper factory in it. While developing that film I ran out of fixer to keep the film from overdeveloping. I used a rudimentary kitchen solution of saltwater but it was only able to do so much, all of the negatived had taken on a ghostly quality.
I felt these two developments had complimented each other quite nicely and fulfilled the somewhat ominous title of the album. So I merged the two.
