Carson Ellis on The Decemberists: “I really did get sick to my stomach when I heard that line”
Carson Ellis’ work, if not her name, should be easily recognizable for anyone who’s ever picked up a Decemberists album. From the shadowy bodies floating into a sickly, sepia-tinged sky on the cover of the band’s 2002 debut, Castaways and Cutouts, to the wizened limbs gracing the front of their latest, The Hazards of Love, Ellis has illustrated each of the band’s record covers in collaboration with frontman Colin Meloy, who she met while studying painting at the University of Montana. Then, Ellis made gig posters for Meloy’s college band, Tarkio; years later, the couple is married and living in Portland, Ore., where Ellis makes art, including, most recently, a whole mess of kids’ books.
In February, when The Decemberists gathered at Newspace studios in Portland for Paste‘s May cover shoot, Ellis dropped Meloy off and took some time to talk about her work on The Hazards of Love‘s artful packaging (including a recent change in cover art), plus the pitfalls and joys of working (and living) with a guy who routinely slaughters kids in his songs.
Paste: Someone said [Hazards‘ cover] went from white to black.
Ellis: It went through a lot of different changes. It was really a struggle trying to figure out what exactly we wanted to do with it. And actually, the art too—we had a totally different idea for the record [art, at first]. The art was pretty much done, but then we realized it really suit the album at all. So that was really a bummer—we spiked that and started from scratch.
Paste: When did you start working on the art for it?
Ellis: It must have been like, November or early December that I started sketching on the first idea, and then I think I was done with that idea around New Year’s—and then we scrapped it and started a different one.
Paste: What was the matter with the first version of it?
Ellis: The first version of it was more psychedelic, which I was really excited about. But the sketch I did for it was in pencil, and it looked really dark and kind of sinister, and I think it fit the record a lot better. And then I’d recently been playing around with colored pencil and liking the way it looked, and Colin liked the way it looked—we thought it was a cool, classic medium for, like, 60s folk records. But then when I did it in colored pencil, it just looked really way too sweet. It took forever, and we finished it, I think, in the middle of the night, and we looked at it and were, like, “Wow, that’s not going to work at all.”
Paste: Was it cute? [Laughing]
Ellis: It was really cute. It had flowers and it had some insects and things that I thought would make it look scary, but it just really didn’t look scary. [I’m] gonna give it to Jenny [Conlee, The Decemberists’ organist]… It had columbine in it, and she said, “Oh, I love columbine!”
Paste: Does that happen a lot, where there’s a draft and it’s a half hour away from being finished and it doesn’t work out?
Ellis: Well, Because Colin and I are married and we live together, we talk about the ideas for the artwork with a lot of time in advance of the record. We started talking about it before half the songs were written. Colin has really specific ideas about visual art, about record covers—it’s a subject dear to his heart—so it’s certainly as much him brainstorming as me. And usually by the time it’s time to sit down and start doing the art we have a pretty good idea of what we want to do in our minds, but this time I guess—we had a vague idea. We kept going back and forth—and I should also mention that we worked with a very talented designer. His name is Mario Hugo, and you should definitely give him big props. Not only because he’s super talented but because he was super patient. The way we work is that we’re constantly collaborating, because [Colin and I] live together, so I’m constantly working on it, he’s looking over my shoulder… So we’re constantly collaborating on it, whether or not we feel like we’re actively doing it or not. He’s just always coming up over my shoulder and being like, “I don’t know about that.” [Laughs] Yeah, it can really nerve-wracking… But you know, it’s nice.
So anyone we work with, designer or otherwise, is inevitably out of the loop on our collaboration process. And I feel like we talked to Mario about it—“We love your work and we want to collaborate with you,” and we would all come up with an idea, and over the course of a weekend we would change our minds completely and call him on Monday and be like, “We scrapped that!” So he was incredibly patient with changing ideas in the middle and changing the color scheme completely. We ran him through the ringer on that. We came up with—the color scheme we ended up using? We [all] came up with initially. It was one of the original comps that he sent us. And then however many months later when we finally saw the idea that [Colin and I] came up with on the Internet, we sat and thought, “We don’t really like that.”
Paste: Did you go crawling back to Mario?
Ellis: [Laughing] We totally did, and he was so gracious… I think that this is a really complete collaboration between Colin, Mario and I. I did the art, Colin came up with a lot of the concepts, and I think what Mario did the design is not something we could have done on our own… Mario was a total keeper. He was awesome. I hope he’ll work with us again. [The final version] makes a lot more sense. It’s way darker. And to Mario’s credit, it was the one he was pushing for from the beginning—and, really, the one that everyone was pushing for. The people who saw it at Capitol were like, “Definitely this one.”
Paste: What was it about the lighter one that you guys liked?
Ellis: That one was more Colin’s opinion. I think he felt, like, maybe it was too intense or something? The more I look at it, it doesn’t feel all that intense, but compared to all the other record covers I’ve done for The Decemberists, it’s so much darker, palette-wise—they’ve got, like, sepias, white. But that was why we hired Mario—because thought, “We have to take a departure, we have to get some new eyes on this, to get us away from all that stuff,” because we felt like we were already doing the same thing.
Paste: How did you draw the characters [from Hazards‘ musical narrative, which are all illustrated in the album booklet]? Because I know you did that for The Crane Wife. Especially for this one, when there were such specific characters, did he tell you, “I think this is what these people look like”?
Ellis: Well, you know how I drew these—I went online and looked at tons of old, like, carte de visite and cabinet cards, old photo portraiture, and then just looked until I found ones that reminded me of the characters, and then changed them a little. [Pulls up images on her laptop.] Like, this guy was wearing a straw hat—this was the rake—he had this straw hat that was, actually, at a rakish angle, and it was so kind of hokey, a little too much, that I took it out—it was just too campy Victorian. So I took the hat out. And he was standing but I put him in the chair. And actually these [details around the rake’s portrait, pictured above] are photos that I drew from that I found on the Internet. I printed them out and made mirror images of them and then drew from those.