No Rain, No Flowers

Designing a single cover, and a lyrics book preview.

Hi! Is it sunny where you are? We had momentary lapses of springtime here before the rain returned but, as they say: No rain, No flowers. Cherry blossoms, tulips, and daffodils are blooming, and it’s beginning to look like we are living in Easter World, the theme park. I’m just waiting for a glimpse of the white rabbit…

There is a feeling of progress in the air; 1. Because ACTORS just released our new single, “In Real Life”, and 2. We just finished tracking the Leathers record and 3. The lyrics book design is underway! 🎉 Allow me to elaborate below.

Designing “In Real Life”

Has it really been three years since ACTORS released any new material? I hope you have been enjoying the new track. I designed the single artwork, so let’s walk through how it was made. Jay and I talked about some paste-up zine-style aesthetics he liked and wanted to use in this upcoming album cycle.

Zine inspiration, we especially liked the cut-out strips of text.

We also needed to create a blueprint that we could elaborate upon with each single release. This can be tricky because the idea has to be developed enough to live in the ACTORS universe but open enough to allow for numerous variations within the theme. DesignBrain™️ activate! I get tired of working on the computer sometimes, so I avoided the faux-handmade method altogether and we started looking for a 1970s era label-maker. After a little Google-ing, Reddit tells us that the Dymo 1540 Office Mate II is still in production and durable enough to withstand our label-making needs. Sweet. Amazon Prime delivered it in two days.

Bob inspects the Dymo 1540 —in real life.

Time to get label punching. I must say it is very satisfying to make labels on this retro machine thingy. There are some minor motor skills required; a hard squeeze for each letter, a soft squeeze for a space, and three soft squeezes for the label margins, beginning and end. Of course, I bought extra tape so I can label everything in my life.

Next I trimmed the label into two lines, pulled off the adhesive, and stuck it to a piece of cheapo copy paper. I paced around a few times, thinking hmm hmm hmm, and picked up a bottle of black ink, then held the paper over the sink and gave it hell. Ink splatters everywhere. Making a mess is quite satisfying. That’s it! I took a high res photo of it, flipped it negative, and we have a new single cover.

Perhaps you were expecting something more complicated? Me too. Not all creative work comes this easily, so I’ll take the win when I can get it. Post-creation, I feel a bit guilty that I haven’t taken very good care of the artwork. One of the cats has taken a bite out of it, and the ink is starting to flake off, smudge and leave pigmented dust on everything. Perhaps it’s even better now? You decide.

Wear and tear.

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Kind of Blue at Jacknife Sound

A Momentous Occasion

Guys, we fucking did it 🌟 As noted above, we’re finally done tracking the Leathers record!!! Jay still has some mixing and mastering ahead of him but my work on the songs at this point, is well, done. I say DONE but it’s a false finish line because once you complete a big task in the game of #bandlife, it’s time to get going on another. Notably, I’ve completed the lyrics and the singing, which was/is a huge, long-game effort. If you’ve been with us since Missing Scene, you’ll know it took a little while to get here. I started Leathers with Jay’s encouragement in the spring/summer of 2016, as a bedroom singer and guitarist. I had no experience on stage or in the studio to speak of and although I loved to sing, the sound of my own voice quite frankly terrified me. At first, it was difficult to tell if I was making progress but all these years later, I can finally see the work accumulate. There were highs and lows as I found my voice as an artist and a singer. I had to be brave. I tried to love myself more and view my emo shyness as a cool superpower (Thanks Beau 💙) instead of some annoying personality trait that usually got in the way. Time is irritatingly finite, and sometimes I wish I worked faster, or started this journey sooner but I think it all unfolded at the right pace. The slow burn allowed me to stretch my comfort zones and now, moments that used to cause me great fear and anxiety, are really no big deal at all.

Photo by Dani Costelo for RANGE

The “Ultraviolet” LP will contain all of the most recent singles (including Phantom Heart from the Reckless EP—we wanted it to receive a vinyl pressing), plus three brand new songs for your listening enjoyment. Singing in my bedroom all these years, I have to pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming. We’re finally here, I’m so excited.

This past week I’ve been hard at work fine-tuning the vinyl/CD layouts and gathering content for my forthcoming lyrics book. It is a work in progress, but I intend the booklet to be around 50 pages, which will include all the lyrics from Missing Scene to now, laid out with photographs selected from my extensive personal archive. The book design is coming along nicely and is inspired by the late, great print magazines of the 90s, like Ray Gun and iD. I’ve included a page preview for you below. I will be running a pre-order very soon, until then…

Is there anything you hope to see inside the book? Please tell me in the comments!

Somewhere in the Mojave Desert

As I gather all the lyrics together for the first time, I have some realizations. It’s a body of work that I always wanted, but only daydreamed about having until now. When I began writing, I envisioned myself being one of those writers who fetishizes paper and pens but when I actually got down to write (after spending more money than I want to admit on bougie notebooks), I did it another way. I wrote these lyrics on my iPhone in the dark before falling asleep, or in the witching hours when sleep was out of reach. Digitally, it’s difficult to quantify the sheer volume of words I had to write to get to the good stuff, but judging from the endless scrolling, there would be enough for a five-alarm dumpster fire of false starts, botched experiments, straight up embarrassments, and other cliché garbage. There are some gems too, I can see my growth as a writer through the songs and I’m proud of the dedication I’ve made to writing, singing, and my creativity in recent years. It reveals a simple truth it took me decades to learn: If you invest your efforts into anything regularly, and even if you do it badly for a while, it will blossom in time. No rain, no flowers.

Thanks for being here. Until next time XO