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Ostrich Eggs and Pink Orbs: The Album Artwork of @coldpolars
To see more of Jacob’s artwork, check out @coldpolars on Instagram. For more music stories, head to @music.
As a teenager, Jacob Escobedo (@coldpolars) would pick through his parents’ record collection and choose what to listen to based on the artwork. There he found the likes of Joy Division, New Order and a host of other legendary groups that would go on to shape the world around him. Turns out the old adage, “Don’t judge a book by its cover” is occasionally wrong.
“I would just sit there and study all the details,” he says. “Now more than ever you can’t really get into albums like that. You’re listening to an album that comes out on Spotify and you don’t have any emotional attachment to the art. The way we experience music is very different now.”
Different, yes, but not dead. Jacob notes the uptick in vinyl records over the last decade has put artwork back on a pedestal –– good news for him, since he now designs covers for bands including Broken Bells and The Shins. He usually opts for more minimalist work; he’s attracted to barren landscapes, thanks to growing up in Pioche, a desert town north of Las Vegas. Take what he’s doing on his current project. As the head of design at Cartoon Network, Jacob is tasked with handling the network’s visual components. Right now, that includes the art for the annual Adult Swim Single program, which features unreleased music from major acts. This year, Jacob went with something a bit more exotic for the cover: hand-painted ostrich eggs.
“We ordered them online and luckily they came with nothing inside of them,” says Jacob. “I originally thought I was going to take a Dremel to them and sculpt the eggs into something. And the minute I laid a Dremel blade onto the egg, it smelled like when you go to the dentist and get a cavity worked on. It smelled exactly like that so I gave up on it and was like, you know what, I am just going to paint.”
The project’s Space Age vibe – psychedelic colors and patterns on single-tone backgrounds – is thematically in line with some of Jacob’s previous work, perhaps, most famously, the pink orb cover he created for the band Broken Bells, a duo featuring The Shins’ lead singer James Mercer and the producer Danger Mouse (aka Brian Burton). The label initially wanted the two on the cover of the album, so Jacob started created collages of them, but they didn’t go anywhere. That’s when Danger Mouse stepped in with some words of wisdom.
“Brian called me up and said, ‘I am going to send the whole album finished. I want you to sit with it for two weeks and come back to me with something,’” recalls Jacob. “I am just influenced by whatever is surrounding me, and I surround myself with all these old books and records and artwork. And I have a big collection of science fiction paperbacks because I love the artwork on ‘60s and ‘70s fiction. So I ended up pulling several covers from my bookshelf and sitting there and going, This sounds so much like you’re in deep space and very lonely. It kind of makes you feel like you’re floating in space.” The sci-fi artwork, along with some old architectural drawings, resulted in an orb. When he turned the color to pink, he knew he was on to something – and so did Broken Bells, who responded to it immediately. The band had been looking for something simple and iconic, and the colored orb nailed it. That’s one of the reasons that Danger Mouse continues to come back to Jacob for work. They have a similar sensibility, both in music and in art. It’s a creative shorthand that Jacob looks to apply to all his work, no matter who it’s with, or what it takes to complete it.
“I work in so many different mediums,” he says. “I try to use whatever medium is best for the project and whatever it inspires.”
– Instagram @music
by via Instagram Blog
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