Make Art With Your Friends
Behind the album cover I made for Mexico City punks Pájaros Vampiro
About a year ago, a guy named Hugo from a band I like called Pájaros Vampiro sent me a message on Instagram: would I want to make the art for their upcoming releases?
I said yes because I like to collaborate with people and I like the band— I didn’t know then how much fun I would have in the process.
I wanted to write about the experience here to highlight the cool ways that art can influence your life experiences, and how those experiences end up influencing the art.
Hugo sent me the songs, which were fantastic. There was an effortless cool to the sound, which blended fuzzed out vocals, heavy drums, and synthesized earworm melodies to produce an effect of overwhelming electricity.
My Spanish is basic, but the lyrics I picked up on were honest and emotional without taking themselves too seriously.
I wanted to draw on the imagery in the band’s name— ‘Vampire Birds’ in English. To me it captures the playful intensity of the band’s sound. I found a big piece of plywood and painted some colorful birds on it, sipping from a purple puddle.
Then I started working on the lettering, listening to the tracks Hugo sent me while sketching out different ideas. The music was fun and upbeat, but it was played with a distinctive attitude. There is an atmosphere to their music, a sound that can only come from them.
In writing out the different words I tried to echo the balance of that sound, something that blended the harder punk aesthetic with a slightly more indie/garage rock sensibility.
I tried to place the text onto a ‘scan’ of the painting but something wasn’t clicking:
The painting itself was cool, but as a singular image it felt flat, and I was looking for a better way to situate it.
I placed the vector files of the text over some old photos I took. Photography suddenly felt like an important texture in the visual world I was trying to define— photographs could place the music in context in a way that the painting alone couldn’t.
I hadn’t yet finished the Pájaros Vampiro album cover when SWMRS went on tour in Mexico in February.
It was our first time doing any shows there, and we played in five cities across the country. I’ll write more about the tour itself in another post, but for now I will just tell you that it was amazing and that you should absolutely check out the bands we played with — Say Ocean, San Venus, and Tresseises are absolute legends on and off stage!
In the weeks leading up to the shows, Hugo messaged me asking how long I would be in Mexico, and if I would want to stay a little longer to do an acoustic set for this Daniel Johnston art exhibit that his work was putting on at House of Vans in Mexico City.
I told him I’d have to change my flight and find somewhere to stay, but why not? It sounded fun!
He offered to let me stay at his mom’s house with him in Aragon, a small town by the airport. I was surprised and touched by his generosity— we had never even talked on the phone, and I didn’t want to impose, but he insisted, so I decided to take him up on it. How often do you get the chance to be somebody’s guest in their hometown?
On Wednesday the rest of the band flew back to the states, and I met Hugo after work at his office in Roma Norte. We drank pulque and mezcal at a place around the corner and I learned more about his life, his band, the inspiration behind the songs.
We had a lot of the same interests— he studied anthropology at UNAM, he loves books, he’s obsessed with music and art.
He told me about the heartbreak that inspired the songs “Alba” and (my personal favorite) “Princesa Catalana”, and the bands and poets that influence him.
We ended up talking a lot about the album cover, what he wanted the final thing to look like.
“It’s cool to see what you did because it’s not what I was expecting” he said.
Did he like it? I told him I felt like we still didn’t have the album cover itself. He agreed that something was missing from the painting.
“I think it could be really cool for the album cover to be a picture of the painting, like out in the world” he said.
We got into Aragon in the early hours of the morning, and he showed me where I was going to sleep, the same room where they recorded the album.
Hugo’s massive collection of Casio keyboards and other musical curiosities lined the walls, stacks of books intermingled with his own paintings and keepsakes. Music and its artifacts have a hypnotic energy to me, and I was excited to spend the night in the room where the album was made. I could almost feel the songs still reverberating off the walls.
We got up early the next morning and walked around the corner to get tamale sandwiches and cups of bright pink atole from a street vendor, which we ate in the courtyard of their house.
“In Mexico City we put everything in a roll” Hugo explained while we traded off queuing up different songs we liked on his bluetooth speaker, stuffing our faces with starch.
We sat on the patio with Hugo’s mom for a while, who fed their dog Jeffrey slices of papaya as I tried my best to string together sentences in Spanish.
She told me about the day they recorded the background vocals for “Solos Somos Numéros”, how funny it was to hear them all singing the falsetto “doo-doo-doos” at the end of the song from the other room.
That night we met up with Hugo’s brother Karel, Karel’s girlfriend Mari, and his bandmates Puxi and Jimmyboy from De Nalgas after their rehearsal. They took me to what they described as the greatest taqueria in all of Mexico City, Taqueria Los Apaches— their local late night standard.
I asked them about the legendary punks vs. emos battle of 2008— which Hugo had told me about when we walked past the plaza where it happened. Jimmyboy was there!
“As a punk” he said.
The al pastor was divine, and the costilla con queso came on a massive platter. It was a perfect meal.
On Friday we met up with Abraham, the singer and guitarist of Pájaros Vampiro, at his family’s restaurant in Aragon. I stuffed my face with an unreal chilaquiles sandwich (everything on a roll) as we shot the shit.
The more I got to know these guys, the more I fell in love with their music— meeting them in real life, seeing the place where the music came from made it all shine that much brighter to me.
The House of Vans in Mexico City is an amazing building.
There is a bigger venue below with an amazing snake run. I asked the venue manager if we could borrow skateboards— of course, she said. Hugo and I pushed around, rehashing tricks we used to know before we got serious about music.
When the doors opened I played a few Daniel Johnston favorites in the gallery. This exhibit was the first comprehensive showcase of Johnston’s visual art, and it was really cool be in the room with his work. You can see the marks on the page where he pressed harder with his pens.
Johnston’s visual art is cut from the same unique cloth as his music— atmospheric, wistful. I was hypnotized by his songs while I acted as their conduit. It’s a hard feeling to describe, but it was as if the energy of the paintings was amplified by the music, and the room vibrated with the energy of Johnston’s artistic spirit.
We transitioned the show to the venue and I did an informal acoustic set. I played a few songs from the setlist I wrote beforehand, but I decided to start taking requests, and I was surprised at how many people showed up wanting to hear SWMRS’ heavier stuff— there was even a moshpit at one point. here’s a video someone took of me playing Hellboy on an acoustic guitar:
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My friends from the SWMRS tour came to the show, and we all went out with Hugo and his friends afterwards.
The boys from San Venus tried to get me to stay one extra day to see Chivas play in the city— they are, and thus have decided that I must also be one of the many “Chivhermanos” living outside of Guadalajara.
But I had to get to Seattle for another gig, and suddenly it was late and it was time for me to go to the airport— my flight was at 6 am. I said my goodbyes to everyone and Hugo and I jumped in a car back to Aragon.
When I left Hugo’s house, it felt like I was leaving home. I felt the glow of everyone’s generosity, the gratitude that comes from being welcomed into a place by the people who make it special.
Back home I felt like I knew the band and the album so much better. I wanted the cover to reflect everything I had absorbed about the music and the people who made it.
Getting to know the stories behind the songs and moving through the world that the music came from gave me a better sense of how to evoke the atmosphere of the music. There is air that music breathes, air that evokes the real world that it comes from. The album cover had to breathe that same air.
That’s how I ended up taking this painting out into the world to photograph it for the cover of Pájaros Vampiro’s new album ‘Se Hace Así’. Below is the final thing. Give it a listen, you’re gonna fall in love with it!
I made a playlist of the bands I befriended in Mexico, along with some incredible stuff that they recommended I check out. Give it a listen if you like good music!
So wholesome!! Love how the final album cover turned out :))
Your excitement comes across loud and clear.