The Soggy Dogs are an indie punk rock 5-piece born out of Murray, Kentucky; I happen to be the lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of the band. While all five members have a background playing music, 2 of them were music majors at the time and insisted on recording an album themselves. The band pretty quickly found its place within the musical scene of Murray, playing bar and house shows. While it was always just for fun, that point in time was a very transitional point for all of us and we wanted to capture our experiences in the form music. "The Soggy Dogs" came from some forgotten joke and sounds like a over-the-top band name pulled straight from the 70s and we wanted to play into that vintage, funky visual vibe with our logo. We had various musical influences from that decade as well and wanted to capture that energy. Along with the two music majors, myself and our drummer, Daniel Reynolds, were both design majors. Daniel created our logo main wordmark in the style we were going for and the album cover was up to me.
Above is the original photo that I took for the album cover. While I had a few ideas in my head, this one always stood out the clearest in my mind. The band standing around in a circle looking down at the camera with the logo centered between us. We shot right before dusk when the sun had started to go below the surrounding buildings in order to get a slightly darker, grainier photo. Obviously, this photo was far from that vision, as it was hard to frame something that specific. I wasn't worried at all and knew I could perfect the vision in photoshop. The main problem was by the time we got this photo, our lead guitarist no longer lived in Murray. This forced us to either exclude him from the album cover all together or to somehow photoshop him in. I wanted to capture a dreamy, funky, pastel aesthetic and decided his face placed over the moon fit that fun, less serious vibe our band exuded anyway.
The editing of the photo was simple. I started by rid of the power line in the back and cutting everyone out to move us closer together. Next I added the moon and our guitarists cut out face on top of that. A few adjustments to give it a washed out, pastel look and it was done. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the photo as a more serious piece of media without the face added and know it looks cheesy and goofy, but that is exactly what we wanted. The strong themes within the album deal with bad habits and vices that can hold you down. But they are presented in a lighter manner as to say these things are possible to overcome and sometimes letting go of certain worries and having a positive, sportive outlook can help overcome these problems. This optimistic, playful attitude defined us as a band and this is how we properly communicated it through our logo and album cover.
