CHULAHOMA

Reimagining the album artwork for the Black Keys’s scuzzy, seductive love letter to hill country blues legend Junior Kimbrough.

OVERVIEW

At the Shillington School of Design, students were asked to complete a media project of our choosing using only handmade, physical materials. I chose to recreate the album artwork of a favorite of mine, Chulahoma, an album of covers by the Black Keys. The music on the album is hazy, narcotic, alluring, electric and beautiful. It seeps through your skin and stays there, heavy on your mind and heart given most of the lyrics are about psychological battles, small and large, around toxic relationships, atonement, jealousy and longing. A single, close-up image of a white flower drowned in molasses captures the overall weight, fragility and beauty of the music on the front of the sleeve. On the back, a glass vase contains and traps the molasses, creating an odd, off-putting visual. There is something very unnatural about it, like the overall cadences and rhythms of the album. Together with the inside flap, the imagery represents how guilt, loss, anger, and shame stays with the narrator of the songs, but how beauty can grow out of it.