Changing horses.

JG is a man with connections. It's good to be connected with a dude like that. One of those is a friend at the Granada Theater, a really great music venue in Dallas. Sidenote: the first time I went to the Granada was back in the mid-90s when it was experimenting with the Studio Movie Grill formula of dining while watching a big-screen movie. The movie I saw that night was Primal Fear with Richard Gere and Ed Norton. What sticks out most in mind was during the brutal murder scene, thinking that shrimp cocktail is an odd dish when accompanied by violent cinema.

Anyway, last week we went to see Ben Kweller play. He's a semi-local boy who grew up in Greenville, TX and has since moved on to be a critical darling in the quote-unquote indie music scene. His last album, appropriately titled Changing Horses, finds him exploring his Texas roots by putting out some straight-forward country songs, a departure for him although his off-kilter/rock voice assures us you won't hear him on the Twister anytime soon. It's too bad though, because his songs have more heart than most of the faire you'll find in mainstream country right now. I challenge anyone to listen to "On Her Own" and try to tell me that if Tim McGraw did a cover it wouldn't be #1 with a bullet.

The great thing about the show was he brought the guitar/pedal steel sound from the last album and applied it to the rest of his rock catalogue to really awesome results.
So, consider this a recommendation to check out Ben Kweller's album Changing Horses.
And consider this an attempt at arty-iPhone photography.


Bonus: a "Where's Waldo" moment from the show - can you spot Jeff & I? Here's a hint, Jeff's keeping the beat and I'm pondering whether or not I'm too old to go to rock shows.

To coin a term.

My buddy Neil just added a new word to my lexicon: blandiose.
Essentially, something intended to be grand or important, possibly more complicated or elaborate than necessry, but affectedly boring.

Online portfolio is now...online.

Allow myself to introduce...myself. While the highly (or nighly) anticipated jseely.com is still very much under construction, I am pleased to say that I have finally got a makeshift portfolio up featuring a smattering of my design, illustration and ad work over at Tumblr (why no "e?" I hav no ida).

Check it all out at jseely.tumblr.com, and tell your friends.

Design on the side.

Latel, I've been keeping busy doing some design work here and there for my generous family and friends. I did a Save-the-Date for my sis (The Paper Lion in McKinney did a great job printing them up).
And on the heels of that, it just so happens that Lauren's future brother-in-law, John, is getting married this month. His sweet mother, being an advocate for the arts (and unemployed artists apparently) asked if I would design an invite for their rehearsal dinner.

The event is at the Sons of Hermann Hall, an excellent live music venue built in 1910, so I thought it would be cool to design the invite like a concert poster. Not only that, John's family has ties to the Texas Sons of Hermann fraternal organization dating back over a century ago.

For inspiration, I looked to the Nashville institution Hatch Show Print.
If you follow country music, country music history or the history, art and culture of the American South, sooner or later you're bound to run into the letters, images and unmistakable "look" of Hatch Show Print. They're one of the oldest working letterpress print shops in America, and over the years their posters have featured a host of country music performers ranging from Hall of Famers Hank Williams, Bill Monroe and Johnny Cash to present-day stars and bands like the Old 97's, Wilco and Coldplay.
With that in mind, as well as wanting something distinctly Texan, I chose to emulate the poster at right.

Below is my interpretation, created in Illustrator and Photoshop. You may notice that the cowboy and ring theme carries through from my previous design - what can I say, I like the imagery.

Click for larger view.

That was the initial design, but to include the family history, a couple other items of information and make it more interesting, I decided to take a more rustic approach in Photoshop.

Click for larger view.

It has been a lot of fun working on these, and if anybody's interested, I've got several more cowboy/wedding ring ideas in storage.