Yeasayer's Cryptic Album Cover, Explained in One Video [Premiere]

Whether vying for attention at the record store or adorning superfans' t-shirts, an album's cover has a lot of responsibility to convey an album's overarching feeling. With their latest effort, Amen & Goodbye, out now via Mute Records, art rock band Yeasayer enlisted Canadian artist David Altmejd to help define the record's image. Altmejd approached the task in his typically improvised, intentionally-imperfect style, which is explained fully in a new video directed by M83, Vampire Weekend, and Beach House collaborator Yoonha Park.

"I don’t think David knew who we were [before this collaboration]," Yeasayer vocalist Chris Keating tells The Creators Project. "But when I started a dialog, it felt like we were speaking the same language."

In the video, Altmejd describes this process, saying, "I make reference to specific characters from Yeasayer's works. There's Robert Mitchum, Kate Francis, Henrietta Lacks, [and] Bob Fossi, the dancer. But also characters that come from the news. We thought it would be really interesting if it was the clash of those two worlds."

The rich and often chaotic sculptures and costumed actors that populate the Amen & Goodbye cover seem to come from far more than two worlds, but this is more of a testament to the expansiveness of Yeasayer's storytelling than anything else. "I gave him a list of 30 or so names and he just sort of ran with it," Keating elaborates on their process. "David started turning them into his own ideas and some things he interpreted in a completely different way, which I love. There’s a reference to a manic pixie dream girl. I wrote it down, and he happened to make this crazy anime character. And I asked who the anime character was and he says, 'That’s the manic pixie dream girl!' And I hadn’t pictured that at all."

Watch the full video explanation of the album cover below:

See more of David Altmejd's work on his website, watch more of Yoonha Park's work here, and download Yeasayer's Amen & Goodbye here.

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