It makes me think of Mike [Gordon]. It's just so funny because he was talking about how that was a thing that he just longed for, and what he really wanted to do with his own band was to be involved in all the creative aspects. While he was making his last album I was interviewing him a bunch during the process, and one time I went to his wife's office and he was actually cutting tissue paper out and building what the album cover eventually became.
Oh, really? So he did do that art?
Yeah.
Oh, that's so cool!
It's the green sparrow on the album cover, which kind of looks like an owl. So I was watching him and he goes, "I'm making my album cover." It was something that was really unique, and he was longing for that, in terms of keeping the creativity flowing in a bigger way than just the music. But that just triggered that in my head when you said how that's bringing all those other things into the band. I'm curious how that shapes the music and the sound of it. Do you have any insight on how that works? Is there something about the ownership of it?
Yeah, for me they're really, really intrinsically related. They're just the same part of my brain. I think it's like that for a lot of people, too. Lately my inspiration's probably been going more in the direction from the music towards the artwork, just because I've been having that on my mind so much as we're sort of bringing out this album and trying to step up every element of our organization -- how we appear visually, not just at a live show, but our presence online and in the world, and thinking about how I want that to be, and thinking about how the music should inspire that as well as just my own visions in my head beforehand. I've never even really pondered the other direction, of a vision and things that I see going into the music, but that's a cool idea. But I think in general just the idea of an artist who's multidimensional and has the visuals and sounds and whatever, the videos, all different things going on, cooking, gardening. [laughs] I think that's cool. I mean, it might not always work, but it's fun to engage all of that at once.
Yeah, there's definitely some overlapping things in there, the chemistry of cooking and gardening, all those kinds of things. It makes sense to me how somewhere inside they're all related.
That's how I think of myself. I'm like, man, I haven't practiced sax in a while, but I gardened all day yesterday, and I also drew a picture and tonight I'm making an amazing dinner, so I don't feel guilty about not practicing because I've been putting all my creativity to really good use in other ways.
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