Greg Mendez’s art transports us to Beauty Land

Cover Me is a column highlighting the stories behind great album covers, as told to Grant Sharples by the artists and bands who made them.

Greg Mendez studied visual art at Drexel, but he didn’t really start caring about his album covers until he was in the middle of his songwriting career. To be more specific, that shift occurred for 2020’s Cherry Hell, and its vibrant, hand-drawn artwork from Kyle Applegate illustrates (pun intended) that point. There’s a spider wielding knives of varying sizes against a soft pink backdrop, where there are even more knives on display. There’s also a balloon depicting a sentient star that reminds me of Twink from the original Paper Mario on Nintendo 64.

Since then, Mendez’ cover art has remained as evocative as the music that lies within. Beauty Land, his latest record, is his most stirring yet from both a musical and visual perspective. There’s an ineffable disquiet to the landscape that Mendez has drawn: a large shadow looms at the bottom of the frame, the proportions are askew and warped; a red sun (or moon?) hangs ominously in the sky. As the Philly indie rocker himself tells me, the image came to him in a moment of pure kismet while he was relaxing on his couch.

For this installment of Cover Me, I spoke with Mendez about switching from photos to illustrations, the surreality of grocery stores, the Diddy Kong Racing origins of Cherry Hell, and his wife’s Mary-like illustration who adorns his self-titled LP.

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Phone Records (2016)

Paste Magazine: Who’s the person sitting next to you in this photo?

Greg Mendez: It was my friend Cody, and that picture is just from this bar, and it was called Old Philadelphia. It closed a while back, but it was a really wild bar in… kind of Fishtown, kind of Kensington, kind of like this weird, in-between neighborhood. That picture was actually taken a couple years after the record [came out]. It wasn’t the original art, either.

Oh, really, what was the original?

The original art was just another picture of somebody else, but I didn’t like it that much. I’m kind of down to change things, you know?

So who was on the original one?

Just an ex.

Oh, gotcha. Your wife, Veronica, took the photo that is now the cover. Is that correct? What led you to go with this picture?

I don’t know. I just kind of thought that there was something about the picture, and then I put the text on it on my iPhone. Like it was just in the Photos app where you add text. I didn’t think about it too much. I just like the vibe, and I like that place. There were almost always drugs and fights and stuff like that, which I didn’t get into any of the fights there, but it did happen.

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¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (2017)

Where was this picture taken? You look very suave. It looks like you should be in Interpol or something.

That was at a wedding in Long Island for people that I didn’t even know. Like, I was just going with somebody, and it was just like a really weird, fancy place, and they had weird furniture. I wasn’t drinking at the time, and my friend took that picture of me sitting in that chair, and I just thought I looked really uncomfortable and uncanny.

Is that what drew you to the picture itself?

Yeah. I mean, for that one, I feel like I didn’t think about the cover that much and for Phone Records, too. I feel like every time I do something, I’m able to pay more attention to expanding things, and album covers were not one of the things at that time. So I was just like, “Yeah, I’ll just take this photo and add this text,” and that was it, yeah.

So did you take this photo with the plan of it being an album cover, or were you just kind of fucking around?

No, it was just a fucking cellphone photo.

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& Gum Trash (2018)

At the time I was sort of getting into taking pictures, and this was a candid street photo I took in Times Square. I don’t know who the kid is, but I can definitely relate to him in that moment. The feeling is so apparent. Whatever it is, he’s over it. I don’t really consider this album to be part of the catalog of my solo albums—most of the songs are full band studio reworkings of songs that had been on Phone Records a few years earlier—and even at the time I didn’t think the songwriting was very good. I think I was trying to be someone I’m not, trying to make “rock” music. I didn’t make this connection consciously at the time, but I was feeling like the kid on the cover about these songs, over it.

But I do think this album cover fits in with the rest in a way that the music doesn’t, it’s kind of a bridge between the earlier two that are photos of me and the following ones that are illustrations. I was still struggling with how to connect the covers to the music, but on this one I guess I realized that I could use a photo that was not of me.

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Cherry Hell (2020)

This is a really cool cover. It’s the first illustrated cover of yours. First of all, tell me more about the spider that’s carrying all of those knives.

It’s not something that I drew. Actually, I did color it in. But my friend Kyle Applegate, who I’ve been collaborating with for a long time in various ways, I was actually asking him for stuff for something even earlier than Phone Records, which I ended up like taking down. But he would send me stuff from his sketchbook, and that drawing was one of them. I think he made it in 2013 or something. When I was thinking about art for Cherry Hell, I found that in an old email, and something about it was just like… this feels like it. I like the spider balloon devil guy. I feel like he’s carrying all these weapons and he should be threatening, but he just looks really upset. I kind of liked something about that, like maybe he’s just brandishing the weapons because he’s hurt or something, not because he’s mean.

And then there’s that star, too. I don’t know if you’re a Nintendo fan, but it almost reminds me of the star from Paper Mario on N64.

I think he actually based it on Diddy Kong Racing. I played games more when I was a kid. He’s definitely a big gamer, so that’s there for sure.

You’d been choosing photos for your covers. Were you looking to break the cover pattern you had going and choose a drawing this time?

Yeah, I was never happy with the covers. I didn’t really put too much thought or effort into them. I also really don’t like images of myself, but for the other two, I just didn’t think about it. So it was just like, “Well, I’m putting my name on it. I guess a picture of me makes sense.” But I never liked them, and I didn’t like looking at them because I really don’t like to look at myself in a photograph. Maybe with this one, I had the realization, like, I could do something that’s not that and treat it like a part of the art. That made me enjoy it a lot more.

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Greg Mendez (2023)

This was my wife [who illustrated it], but I did color it in. Originally, she had done a painting that was that same drawing, and she didn’t like the painting part, so she went back and traced the shapes of it, and then I colored it in [with] colored pencil. She was making Mary-inspired portraits for a time. There were a bunch of them, and something about that one felt really special. It felt like the emotion of the album in a way. I think the painting is actually better, like the original one, but she wasn’t happy with it.

Why wasn’t she happy with it?

I don’t know. I don’t really press her on it, you know?

So how does this capture the emotion of the album?

Well, actually, it’s more that I tried to capture this when I recolored it, but in the original one, especially, it was even more ambiguous as to what she was feeling. She looked kind of sad, kind of contemplative, also maybe suspicious, like she’s like looking suspiciously up a little. I liked that mix of things in the expression and the glance.

It is a really ambiguous expression. What do you think she’s thinking about? What is she looking up toward?

It could be like anything, which I kind of like. I see it as something that she’s maybe suspicious or afraid of. The shape of the arches around her kind of looks like a hunching figure to me, and then on the back, it’s that shape in red with no Mary. I think of it as like, she’s in someone’s shadow that she maybe doesn’t know about or is wary of. Or maybe she’s just praying and feeling all these things, I don’t know. It doesn’t look like a real person. The eyes are big, and it’s very stylized, but it felt very human to me. There was a lot going on in there.

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Beauty Land (2026)

All this talk of shadows makes for a nice segue into Beauty Land because there’s that huge shadow. Whose shadow is that, or do you know whose shadow that is?

I don’t. Is it the viewer’s shadow? Like, are you looking in and that’s your shadow, or is it something else? It definitely has that ominous thing to it for me, especially if it’s somebody else’s shadow. Like, is this person walking into the mountains, or are they going to go into that house? Is it their house? What are they up to? And it’s accidentally the same shape as the arches in the last one.

Do you feel like they’re connected in your mind?

Oh, I didn’t mean for them to be. This one, I did just draw it in a sketchbook. I was just sitting on the couch, I saw this image in my mind, and scribbled it out. I actually think I did it while I was recording the self-titled, and then I didn’t really think about it until I was struggling to come up with the album cover for this one, and I had a bunch of different things that I was cycling through. I flipped through sketchbooks and saw that, and something about it just felt like this album. Sorry, I sound like such an idiot. I would like to be more articulate about it, but it just struck me when I was thinking about the album, and it just felt like a good setting for it.

I want to ask you more about the setting. How did this image come into your mind? What were you thinking about? What were you doing? I know you said you were recording the self-titled at the time, but do you remember the moment when this image struck you and you felt compelled to draw it?

Not really, to be honest. I don’t even think it was originally supposed to be a shadow, like it maybe was just more of like a silhouette, and then the way that I drew it ended up looking more like a shadow, or like either one, like it was unclear, like it kind of looks flat and not at the same time. I thought the mountains looked good behind it. The mountains in the original weren’t as defined. It was more like a rectangle. The page was a rectangle.

What does the shadow signify for you? Why did it feel like such an important part of the cover?

I don’t know. I think especially when I made the original sketch of it, I was feeling pretty bad and bleak. I don’t know if I felt like it was me, but I just felt this darkness floating through my life or the world or something. Maybe that was just my brain making an image for that. The record kind of felt like that, too.

How do you connect the cover and the songs themselves? How are they in conversation with each other?

I feel like they’re both a little bit lonely. Everything on the cover should be beautiful. [There are] beautiful purple mountains and there’s green grass. Even the road is not a paved road; it’s kind of like dirt, and then you got this red sun or moon, but it still feels like there’s something wrong. I can’t put my finger on it. I feel like that about some of the songs too.

Like there’s almost something uneasy or even menacing to some degree?

But it’s not like distorted guitars or whatever the equivalent of that would be. That’s a very in- your-face version of that. What I liked about the cover with the music was that it felt like it was hiding,

Like there’s something lurking underneath that is trying to get out but can’t?

Yeah, it’s like, why isn’t this a beautiful landscape? Why does it make me a little uncomfortable? Nothing bad’s gonna happen.

Not to be too on the nose, but are we looking at beauty land itself? Is that the setting here?

I guess, yeah. Beauty Land is honestly a fucking beauty supply store fifteen minutes from me that I passed by all the time. I was just like, “God, I love that name and the space between the two.” I think the cover feels like that to me, at least, like… Where are you at?

I’m in Kansas City.

Oh, cool, yeah. I mean, this should be Beauty Land, right? Yeah, we got mountains and, like, green grass and shit. Like, why does it suck so much?

We don’t even have mountains. It’s just all flat. At least there’s like, some sloping hills in Philly!

You guys have that sky, though. Every time I drive through the Midwest, I’ve never seen a sky that big and the yellow landscape. There’s something vast [about it].

When you were driving by Beauty Land all the time, why did you want to call your latest record that? What made you want to incorporate it into your music?

I’m just, honestly, terrible at naming things. That’s why the last one didn’t have a name. I had a list of things, really trying to think of what to call this and that. I just kept coming back to that one. It’s kind of like… fucking Disneyland or something like that. Kind of like the cover, where this thing should be beautiful, or we’re told that this is beautiful, even though you can tell that it’s not. Beauty Land reminded me of that. It’s like you go to an amusement park and you’re like, “No, this isn’t real.” Well, we live in that. All the time, we’re being sold this veneer of like, “What’s going on here?” It’s completely obvious that that’s not the truth. And it reminded me of that in a way that also felt not too serious.

I mean, Beauty Land sounds like it could be the name of a theme park, and the cover’s got that surreal, fantastical edge to it, almost where it feels unreal.

And it is, like… we’re really, just getting on rides. Like, “Oh yeah, I gotta get on the work ride.” Now I’m on the ride where I’m feeding myself, going to the grocery store. Like, that’s not real, you know?

Everything’s a little bit fake when you think more about it. What is a grocery store anyway?

It’s really bizarre. If you took somebody from like, three thousand years ago, and you put them in fucking Walmart, they would be like, “What is going on?”

Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist and critic. His work has also appeared in Interview, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City. You can follow him on BlueSky, Instagram, and the site formerly known as Twitter @grantsharpies.

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