Also I think you can’t really talk about Circa Survive without mentioning Esao Andrews, who has created three amazing cover images for you. I know you’re something of an artist yourself and was curious whether there were any ideas you gave to him regarding the cover and what do you think of the final product?
It was weird. He gave us ten different sketches at first. I think we were all feeling like the last record’s image was going to be really hard to top. A lot of us were feeling, like, “Alright, where is it? Where is it?” because he always delivers. I remember sending an email of a list of thirty different things, like imagery, that I thought were really cool and had been playing with in my own art. Towards the end Esao was feeling a little bit of frustration and maybe, like, “Oh, shit. How am I going to top this last record?”
So the last thing I knew is we sent him an email of some imagery and we had given him one of the sketches specifically to focus on. Then a couple weeks later we saw the final image and it was just, like, “Bam. It was there [laughs].” As soon as I saw it I was so excited and so happy. I felt like he totally nailed it again. I’m a huge Esao fan and I have three of his prints hanging in my apartment that I live in with my girlfriend. I’m a fan beyond just what he does for us, and I was, like, “Wow. He just created my favorite painting that he’s ever done and it’s for our album. That’s double awesome, so it’s, like, bonus.” He’s fantastic. He’s an antenna for the band. He can pull things out of the ether that are so perfect it’s almost creepy how perfect they are.
What exactly is the creature that’s behind the guy?
That’s open to interpretation on how anyone wants to see it. For me, I kind of interpret it as there’s this halo aspect when you look at it from afar. It immediately makes me think of a blessing and a curse, or what makes you eventually destroys you. That’s how I interpret the painting, but I think everyone has their own interpretation of it. I’ve heard so many interesting takes on it that it’s cool to just leave it open.