MUR

To know Max Hartman is to love him. If you have seen a Domino’s Pizza commercial in the past few years, chances are you have heard him. That announcer hawking the latest pizza deals that sounds like your game-watching buddy or that friend who asks how you’re doing and really means it... that’s him. He is a multi-talented actor, musician – and with a voice like that – one hell of a singer.

So when I heard he was wrapping up final mixes of the latest album with his band, Mur, I was quick to throw my hat in the ring. I believe my very professional business inquiry was something like: “Hey man, let’s do some Mur shots for the new album.” If you read my post about collaboration, you know that it is sometime even more challenging working with friends & family, which Max is basically both, plus to top it all off – I am actually a fan of the band.

We had a casual lunch meeting to kick around early thoughts. He mentioned that Mur had gone through many changes since the previous album – moving back and forth from Los Angeles, personnel re- structuring, and life events that had shifted the gravity of the band’s sound. Not only had Max parted ways with an original co-founder of the group, he had also lost several friends to suicide as well as his own father, who passed away from complications of Parkinson’s disease. The harsh realities of life arrived in short order.

In addition to the emotion of the music, we looked at the local environment in which the album would be released: a Dallas music scene that was rife with new young groups who were more products of social media hype than rehearsal room sweat. Mur had released their first album more than 10 years prior and have a more traditional guitar-bass-keys-drums rock sound as opposed to the synthesizer gimmicks of the music scene at the time. At that first meeting, we arrived at a simple mantra of what we wanted to say: “The adults are in the room.”

This was enough to get me jazzed. He sent me an advance mix and it was a done deal.

I began the look-board. My touchstones immediately went to black-and-white grainy street photography – the type of images that the eye instantly reads as integrity. Back in the days of film and natural light, the actual integrity of WHAT was being shot is what made for a successful image. This seemed in line with the ethic of the band, so the path felt right.

The lead me not only to the usual street photography masters of the past century, but also the classic nostalgia of Life magazine and specifically the work of longtime contributor Yale Joel. While his work always had a nice photojournalistic integrity – upon closer look, the storytelling angle always has a second or even third level depending on the composition and character. His work establishes such vibrant narrative that it sometimes even seems posed.

I began to notice themes and a repeated style to the photos I was compiling for the look-board and I kept coming back to certain terms: classic, integrity, suits, glasses, cinematic, bold. The work-a-day Manhattan businessman became a strong image. And while the endeavors of the musicians in Mur were artistic, I wanted to capture the work ethic that can go into art when it is taken as seriously and professionally as were the hours of work that had been put into writing and producing this album. This imagery began to quickly inform the art design of the shoot itself... and upon the release of the album, the band’s wardrobe and style.

We met for lunch again and I showed him the look-board. “I dig it. Yeah, that’s cool. Totally...” And then we got to the last image: Yale Joel’s “Piano Recital, Manchester, IA”.

Tears sprung to Max’s eyes and he struggled to clear his throat a couple of times. As I said before, Max and I are close friends, but until this point I had yet to see him to be so immediately emotionally effected. The photo is a living room gathering of family and friends in a parlor ready to watch a young boy perform what he has learned on the piano. Max’s response was very personal. “This. This. Sometimes I don’t want to sing at my uncle’s funeral. Sometimes I just want to be sad.” After all the grief and the tumult of the years since the last album, Max was just trying to get out from under it all. Releasing this album was about releasing a lot more than an album.

It was clear. This was the concept.

The story was the idea of leaving the grief of the past behind you, while taking humility and integrity with you, on the path to greatness.

Since the concept was an album and subsequent promo packets, we were lucky to be able to plan a series of final shots that would encapsulate this new narrative. I wanted to do a reconceptualizing of Yale Joel’s piano recital shot, an Iconic band shot, and live shots from the album release gig.

There are shots in the album art that were unintentional when we shot them. What was intended to be a much larger shoot, due to scheduling, became much more improvisational. I ended up calling in a
favor with Kitchen Dog Theater in Dallas and asking to use their empty theater DAY OF. As with anything, flexibility is the key. And that is where we caught a lot of my favorite final photos.

In the end, what turned out to be the most poignant aspect of the project was that Max intended to donate the initial proceeds of the album to a local mental health and suicide awareness charity.

The incidental photo of the empty chairs. The band huddled together watching something we don’t see while surrounded by an otherwise empty theater and exit signs. Coming from grief, these are images of people very much alive and very much moving focused in the present, but still cognizant of those that are gone.