Musicians are known to be creative people, and unsurprisingly, that creativity often extends beyond their music. Specifically, many musicians are also artists beyond their touring and recording obligations.
Music and art are complementary creative pursuits that can help musicians pay the bills, omit production costs (why hire someone for album art and merch when you can do it yourself?) or simply gives their eardrums a break.
We spoke to five musicians that also run successful design companies and exhibit at prestigious shows, in addition to their musical lives. White Zombie’s Sean Yseult designs patterned scarves that sell at Henri Bendel, Sloan’s Jay Ferguson is putting together album art for his upcoming boxset, Singer/songwriter (Get Him to the Greek, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story) Dan Bern makes portrait and landscape paintings, songwriter (Ultra Vivd Scene) Kurt Ralske has exhibited his video installations at the Venice Biennale and drummer Liz Degen runs a successful freelance photography business.
We wanted to know about the challenges of a multi-disciplinary creative life. Is it possible to give each creative career the same amount of attention? And, which came first: the music or the art?