We’ve had a number of people ask us about the inspiration for (and design process of) the packaging for Wigs & Liquor. Since we had a good time putting it together, we thought we’d share how it happened.

While we were working on the music (you know, the important part) we occasionally threw around some ideas for album covers. They came out of nowhere/everywhere like lots of brainstormed ideas will. Lots of funny turns of phrase, and plenty of idea juice lubing up the old art gears.

We decided to call the album Wigs & Liquor based on the experience of a friend. Essentially their story boiled down to, “You know you’re in a rough neighborhood when you see the wig store right next to the liquor store“. This experience inspired the song of the same name, and eventually we were digging on it for the title.

While all this was going on, we were all looking for artistic inspiration. A chance discovery of an old, freaky “monster” hot rod sticker (a cereal box prize, we think) got us thinking about that feel, which eventually led to finding the art of Coop.

His work is plain awesome, and to us it was stylistically a great representation of our music. It would have been great to get Coop to do the art for our record! Except for two things:

1. We can’t afford that kind of coolness.

(and)

2. We couldn’t even ask. And if we felt that way, we probably needed to refer back to #1.

Meh. What to do?

Well, we would have to take that inspiration and do it ourselves.

To be continued…