Artwork, Given + Honor

About the artwork. Did you guys give Josh any direction, or did he just make the cover happen?

That definitely came from a group discussion. One thing we all wanted to do, once we started talking about it, we didn’t want any Photoshop manipulation. We wanted things to be in-camera. If we were gonna use photos, we wanted it to be all natural, all captured in-camera with natural lighting. No Photoshop shit. It’s just way too done. And it started from a symbol, a symbol that wound up being created with actual arrows. That was a symbol that was bounced around. Scott presented it from a book of symbols he had. I remembered we already used it on a Tribes of Neurot flyer probably in ’97, and basically, the three arrows bound together, it looks quite runic. We’re not sure of the origin, but its meaning is gleaned as the strength of the whole is greater than the individual. The unity will bring about greater strength. Obviously that’s true with our band, and so we thought it would be a good, simple, image that we could approach a million different ways for the coming years centered around this record. And we started talking about the photographs themselves, and we remembered that a friend of ours who booked some solo shows for Scott and I in Slovakia is also an archeologist, and he had gifted both Scott and I separately some actual, archeological arrowheads, which were thousands of years old from that area. So we instantly thought, “Okay, we can bind these onto shafts and bind them together to form this symbol,” and having actual artifacts, even though it’s impossible to say whether the energy will transfer through a photograph, we felt better knowing it was real, that they actually are ancient pieces. We started brainstorming. What do we want? We want a space, an environment. We didn’t want to speak to what it was going to be, except that someone was obviously living and occupying this isolated space, where they were obsessing on writings and photographs, or meditating on them, it’s a fine line, you’re not sure. Writing their own. Our lyrics were actually transferred onto pieces of paper torn out of old books, antique books, to kind be present in the photograph as part of the natural environment of the space. So this person’s obviously obsessing, they’re meditating, they’re giving their own spiritual offerings. There’s also painted elk jawbones holding up the arrows, and ashes of burnt offerings, but you’re not sure what all this is. The only thing you are sure of is it’s an intensely personal, almost claustrophobic space where this person is going through the gamut of emotional release or transformation, or obsession, or meditation. Despite the isolation, they obviously need to communicate with the outside world, which is emphasized by the vintage communication equipment in there as well. So you have this strange irony, which is kind of the irony of our band – I don’t know if “irony” is the right word – we’ll have to just ask Roget later. This is intensely personal music to us. This is our self-expression. We really don’t allow any outside influence to sway us one way or another, whether it be the expectations of fans, or the industry – even though we’re completely outside of the industry, people do seem to bow to the expectations of underground music, for whatever reason I can’t understand – the expectations of anything. The expectations of business, of finance. The expectations of our past work. We can’t let any of that influence the fact that this is our personal self-expression. This is the way that we cope with being human beings in this world and our way of trying to find something real and meaningful. It really doesn’t matter whether anybody likes it or not. Now, the juxtaposition there is that obviously we have some desire or need or drive to put it in public. We don’t just make it for ourselves, make our own recording and take it home. We do throw it out there in the public, and so despite the fact that we are having this intensely personal experience with our music, we feel this drive to throw it out there in the music. I think that’s kind of reflected into it as well, and I think that whole vibe of obsession, or meditation, or offerings, with the writings and the photographs and the electronics, and the spiritual totems, and the way the photographs are taken, and the way it doesn’t tell an exact story, it just hints at things – I think it’s a perfect visual space for people to trip on while they’re listening to the album. Kind of in the classic album sense, where you’re listening to the album and you’re reading the lyrics and you’re looking at the nice big gatefold, you know? Obviously most people’ll be doing this on a CD booklet or no booklet at all, listening to shitty mp3s, but that’s beside the point.