A Wilhelm Scream: Career Suicide …Ten Years Later
An all together too long look back on A Wilhelm Scream’s album Career Suicide and it’s re-release.
This album is nice.
So nice we made it twice.
Back in the pre-everything is documented days of 2007
While A Wilhelm Scream (AWS) was on Nitro records, Trevor (guitarist / singer) asked me if I wanted to concept and execute their upcoming album. Hell yeah I wanted to work on this, any time you get to work with friends is a win. So we got some beers, smokes, and coffee and got to brainstorming. We’ve collaborated on many, many projects but man this one is special.
We came up with an overly complex story that involved The Horse and The Jockey living together. The layout would follow them through a normal day in their life and end with The Jockey getting rid of The Horse.
I love putting story hooks that we can come back to at a later date, in our inital script, The Horse gets shot and killed, instead we chose to leave the ending ambiguous. That ambiguity paid off when we revisited the album 10 years later.
We got a bunch of our friends and collaborators to create artwork that would populate the house. Emily Walter staged everything and shot the photos at Nuno’s (signer) house. Nick (drummer) was The Horse, and Trevor’s brother Ian was The Jockey.
This is what brainstorming looks like.
Look at those eggs.
Under the CD you find out that The Horse has a broken leg, just like on the cover painting.
Career Suicide & Cock Fight: Ryan Levesque. Rhino v. Piranha: Derek Deal. Squid v. Whale v. Cheney: Jamie Despres. Alligator v. Cats: Kate Ouellette. Cobra v. Mongoose and Monkey Knife Fight: JRTMCP. Photos: Emily Walter
I can’t believe I still have these files.
Fast forward 10 years later.
Holy shit that went fast. It was time to revisit Career Suicide.So, instead of doing a the smart and easy straight re-release of the first album, we got some mai-tais and sangria and got to brainstorming again. We used our earlier ambiguous ending as a jumping off point, and decided to see what happened to The Horse.
Surprise, surprise The Jockey was nowhere to be found (deadbeat) and The Horse had a Horse/Jockey Kid.
Nick returned as The Horse. Emily retuned as the photographer. We introduced Olin as The Horse’s Son.
Ryan’s original painting hangs at No Problemo so of course we would shoot there. The other shots were at Trevor’s house, and the beach.
Check out that burrito.
We planned the shots to mimic the original album.
Oh yeah, we hid those lyrics on the glue flap. I don’t think anyone’s ever noticed.
Note to self: Record labels are supposed to go A,B,C,D etc. NOT A,B,A,B.
Behind The Scenes
The shoot was so much fun and there’s a ton of stuff that we shot that’s never seen the light of day, until now.
