My friends the Denver Colorado band The Knew, kindly commissioned me for another album design and related art direction for their latest release Man Monster.
This collection of songs continues their catalogue of wooly, raw, and bright songs that beg to be seen live in the sweaty flesh with 6 pack at arm’s reach. One their songs in this release – Old & Young, captured at a live show and edited by Drummond West, records both their sound, energy, and their aesthic experience superbly.
During the dead of winter this year, we began discussing what this record will be and what it accomplishes for the guys in the band. Each would offer you their own ways a saying it, but one explanation was summarized in an email to me from their drummer Patrick Bowden:
“So, Man Monster. The overall theme of the album as translated through Jake’s lyrics is about our current stage in life when you start to realize partying isn’t all that life has to offer, yet you still love to rage when you get the chance. The 12 or 13 songs on the album transition through different stages of your 20s and how you party during those years- how you love it, get over it, hate it, realize there is more, move on, and then love it again in a different capacity.
When thinking of an album title, I think the name “Man Monster” just encapsulates you or I on an off-night, when Meghan (his wife) or Claire (mine) tell us we stink from booze and BBQ, or don’t understand our insatiable need to go to the Larimer Lounge on a Tuesday. And, the name is also sorta weird, funny, and stands out on its own.”
With conversations like this, I found resonance (maybe even solace) in the fact that this dichotomy in a man’s impulses is surly not new, and I looked back to the frontier days of the Colorado territory when men were surely men, and surely this condition manifest in their days of trail blazing and hide-skinning, as it does on our days of traffic-jams and cell phone service contracts. This idea led me to the Library of Congress, where a wealth of beautiful 19th century artwork can be found in the public domain. Then as now, man battles the wilderness – both in internal natures of men and external landscapes – and are shown in woodcuts and paintings of Colorado scenes. Mount of the Holy Cross by Thomas Moran, and The Guardians of the Herd, Buffalo Bulls Charging Hunters a woodcut by W. M. Cary resonated with me as a suitable way to represent the spirt of the album and of the 4 long, tall, and strapping Denver men in The Knew.
Finally, the best metaphor I found in the theme of this album was that the condition of a Man Monster is a lot like that of a Werewolf. With a track on the album titled “Yellow Moon”, it seemed a fitting layer to the story. So as we grow a little older, and hopefully a little wiser, may we still foster the desire to seek the wilderness inside us and let it’s teeth be shown. Now a little older, may our college-degreed and mortgage-bearing consciouses still find the right places and times to head into the night and let our claws flex, full of sounds like found on this record. May we all keep this part of ourselves alive and each let our Man Monster howl.
Buy and listen to Man Monster as a download, CD, or vinyl here.
Footnote: Some alternates of the cover design we explored this spring. Getting the right dichotmy of structure vs. a feral and free-wheeling character feel right with the typography took some work, and it was a priority to let the original spirit of the landscape painting show.
