To The Light: Film Photos With Paper Bird

PAPER BIRD – Film Photos

Today is all about getting to take film photos of the epically awesome Colorado band, Paper Bird. I can’t tell you how great this project was! Every person involved has become a really wonderful friend – even doing the project alone has opened a ton of doors to meet lots of other folks, some of which I’m working on collaborative efforts with for future releases… I feel so lucky to have gotten to know these wonderful people better throughout the process of making their album art. As many of you know, I try extremely hard to not just provide artwork for albums, but also a much larger experience. This often includes branding or re-branding an entire group. Paper Bird has been around for a little while now and had a pretty distinctive look. However, they’ve had some lineup changes and a major overhaul on their sound. So, when Merne and I went to their ranch to discuss artwork ideas, it was a bit tricky. I think all of us had it in our mind to do something rad with a desert and some kind of organic undertone. What came next was kind of surreal.

The Meeting

First off, I had my puppy, Ida (who was less than three months old at the time). She’d thrown up a couple times on Merne’s lap in the truck ride to the ranch due to car sickness and when we arrived she promptly peed in the recording studio at their house. She then proceeded to run around and break everything. So, it was a bit of a rocky start… However, once we sat down to discuss ideas, the weirdest thing happened: every idea they pitched, I already had sketched it up. This happened to like five ideas. It was super wild. They were mentioning a desert and possibly a large obelisk embedded in the dirt. I literally pulled up a drawing of a bunch of people pulling an obelisk in a desert up on my iPad and said, “like this?” It just kept happening like that. I think we all kind of took it as serendipity. We ventured into their recording studio having a couple ideas rattling around in our heads.

Storming Our Brains

Once we sat down and started listening to the new sound, one thing became glaringly evident: This isn’t the same organic, free-spirited, awesome band that it once was. This was now a sophisticated, tougher, polished, badass group of musicians. So, deserts, obelisks, ropes, etc. were all thrown out the window almost immediately upon hearing their new sound. We all agreed that we needed something more sophisticated and ‘city-ish.’ My mind directly went to one of my favorite photographers ever, Helmut Newton. As per the weirdness that had been set at the beginning of the meeting, I happened to have a book of his in my back pack. The band flipped out – as most do when looking at Helmut Newton’s work. It was settled. We were going to do mostly film photos.