Pearl Jam: The Backspacer – artwork by Tom Tomorrow


“Backspacer” (Pearl Jam)

To be honest, probably the only reason I’d impulse-buy a Pearl Jam record would be because of Tom Tomorrow’s1 artwork. I’m not much of a fan of the band otherwise even though I have 43 of their songs currently in my iTunes library. The cartoonist, Tom Tomorrow, on the other hand, has long been a favorite. I even donated to his server bandwidth over-run sometime early on during the Bush years.2. Anyway, Billboard interviewed Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder about their new album:

Tell me about the artwork that Tom Tomorrow made for “Backspacer.”

I’ve followed his work for years. I read “This Modern World” way back in the early ’90s and thought we should and could collaborate. The night at Madison Square Garden when Ralph Nader spoke, in 2000, I was quite thrilled to meet Tom. He came to a couple of gigs here and there and we stayed in touch. Previous to meeting him, I wasn’t sure that even our politics were up to par for his biting take on things. I wasn’t sure that as a popular band if we were underground enough for him. We just happened to be talking at the time this came around, and we thought, “We’ll give it a shot and we’ll remain friends if it doesn’t work.” What he did was phenomenal. He put so much thought into it, to the point where we had so many conversations about each drawing, that I said, “Look, I just need a week to write lyrics” (laughs). At the same time, it was invigorating. Certain ideas came from him as far as the overall scope: the randomness, but also the detail. It’s really a cool piece of art.

[Click to continue reading Pearl Jam: The ‘Backspacer’ Audio Q&As | Billboard.com -page 1 starts here btw ]

Ben Sisario of New York Times wrote:

Dan Perkins, who writes and draws the political cartoon “This Modern World” under the name Tom Tomorrow, got some bad news in January.

Village Voice Media, the chain of alternative weekly newspapers, was dropping all syndicated cartoons as a cost-cutting measure, and Mr. Perkins lost 12 papers at once, a major blow to his income. He called his friend Eddie Vedder, the lead singer of Pearl Jam, whom he had met at a Ralph Nader campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in 2000. Maybe, Mr. Perkins said he hoped, he might get a gig designing a Pearl Jam concert poster.

“He said, ‘Maybe we could help out a little bit,’ ” Mr. Perkins, 48, remembered Mr. Vedder telling him. “ ‘Maybe we could put something up on our Web site. Maybe you could do a couple posters for concerts coming up. And maybe you could have a shot at designing our next album cover.’ That’s about when my jaw hit the floor.”

Within weeks he was working on the cover for Pearl Jam’s latest album, “Backspacer,” which will be released on Sept. 20. It is Mr. Perkins’s first album cover, and the first time that Pearl Jam has gone outside its circle to find a cover artist. Both parties also realized that they had been brought together partly as a result of the transformations of their fields by new media, since the Internet has wreaked the same havoc on newspapers as it has on the music industry.

[Click to continue reading With Dan Perkins and Pearl Jam, Bad Luck Turns Good – That’s Rock ’n’ Roll – NYTimes.com]


“The Future’s So Bright I Can’t Bear to Look” (Tom Tomorrow)

Via Tom Tomorrow’s blog and/or Twitter feed, I forget.

Footnotes:
  1. aka Dan Perkins []
  2. and got an autographed calendar in compensation []

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