Music People

behind the album art with Eggs On Mars

I Enjoy Music and wow I Enjoy Album Art as well! How do you ever decide how to depict the visual component of your musical album? How do you figure out what goes on that square? Do you think that album art will ever start defaulting to 9x16 dimensions, to fit on a phone first? Will movies eventually all be vertically oriented? Sorry, I just started spiraling. Whoopsie daisy.

Good thing there's a new album from the Kansas City, MO band Eggs On Mars to calm me down. A soothing album of "soft psych" music, mellow percolations, congenial transmissions, good vibes for sure. Eggs On Mars just put out an album called Good Morning (I Love You)—it's another release from the label Enigmatic Brunch, who last year put out an excellent album from Eggs On Mars's lead guitarist and recording engineer, Joel Stratton. Loved that Joel Vs. Joel album, wrote about it on the blog of course...

I guess I had breakfast on the mind with Eggs on Mars (a previous album of theirs is even called Warm Breakfast) because if you love breakfast, you probably love the twin sensations of consistency and contentment. Breakfast might be the same every day, or it could change seasonally, but even if you've had many breakfasts in your life, it's an incredible meal every time, and might even have the capacity to surprise you every now and then. There's actually nothing routine about the routine...d'you know what I mean?

Every pancake I've ever eaten is sacred, every drop of hollandaise sauce has been ambrosia to me. Sometimes, the familiar is the sublime! That's how I feel about this Eggs On Mars album.

And love...is like breakfast too? Something that nourishes you, something that you must put effort into tending daily, something that is very familiar but a little bit new every time. As encapsulated by the Eggs On Mars song "And I Know": "Paths and plans may turn and fall apart we’ll get through you’ll see / I love who you are and were, I love who you’ll be."

Eggs on Mars—that would be Brad Smith, Doug Bybee, Joel Stratton and
Mason Potter—shared the backstory of their album art with me! Look at these bodacious flowers:

"We are very proud of this short little collection of modern love songs that turns our midwestern melancholia into melodic pop," they wrote. "All these songs are about loving people in happy and also the sad moments. Flowers are given to people during all kinds of celebrations as well as during dark depressive situations as well; birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, parties, funerals, mourning, apologetically, etc. We liked how they're given to show you love someone in all these different situations. So we had about two dozen different artists, including John Andrews (of The Yawns), make flowers and then we arranged them into the bouquet collage for the album art. It has a miscellaneous feel with different styles, color palettes, textures, and skill levels, and yet works so harmoniously."

A close-up on those flowers: