BUTT Blog readers first met Ben Tousley back in January, when I posted a sweet fan letter he wrote us explaining how BUTT magazine helped him come out of the closet. What I didn’t know at the time was that Ben was already hard at work making his gay mark on the indie rock scene, as the graphic designer of the cover and packaging for the hugely popular Grizzly Bear record Yellow House. He also did their follow up record Veckatimest, which hit #8 on the Billboard recording charts the week it was released. Now Ben’s getting steady work and a chance to keep developing his craft. When the Bloomington, Indiana native came to town last week I showed him around and we had a chat about his successes.

BUTT: So what reaction did you get when you were on the BUTT blog back in January?
Ben: Ed [Droste from Grizzly Bear] was really happy for me, and my friends thought it was great. It was funny – my friend who made the ‘I Come First’ necklace I was wearing showed the whole website to his metalsmithing teacher. He just opened it up in class and showed it to her! (laughs) ‘Cause he was so proud that his little thing was on it as well.

Did you know Ed Droste before you did that piece?
Oh definitely. We’ve known each other for maybe four years. I think he first contacted me through last.fm, which is a website that tracks what music you listen to. He asked me to do a poster for the reissue of Horn of Plenty, so I did that and we kind of became friends.

He took you under his wing?
Yeah. We talked a lot online, and then they played a show in Bloomington, Indiana, where I live. So I met them then – it was their first tour, they were still recording Yellow House. Back then I hadn’t come out at all. I came out pretty recently, kind of like a year and a half ago.

You came out to Ed before you were out to other people, right?
Yeah, Ed was the first person I came out to. It was a forced kind of thing. I felt like I had to, I was at the breaking point. It was really not a fun time for me. And then I came out to another gay friend of mine that I’d known for a really long time, and then I came out to my best friend, and some other guys, and then it snowballed.

Was anyone surprised?
Yeah, especially at that time, because I had been dating girls and stuff – kind of right up until the breaking point. With me and Ed though, it’s like a support system. He supports me and I support him (laughs). It seems like we talk almost every day, but I don’t know if that’s true. He used to send me songs from the Yellow House sessions as they were recording them, and I’d give feedback. I dunno if it would ever be implemented or anything, but it was super fun for me to hear that stuff as it was being done.

Of course! You were, like, just a fan!
Yeah. I don’t know how many people are obsessed with that album, but I’m one of them for sure. I think it’s an amazing album, so hearing it being recorded was phenomenal.

And tell me about the design process of doing that album cover.
I begged Ed to let me do it! Their friend Patryce Bak took the photos, and the band said that I could do the layout and design for the record. The photos were gorgeous, so it was just up to me to accentuate them with the typography and convey the delicacies of the music. There actually wasn’t that much back-and-forth with the guys, they just let it become what it was gonna become. I just listened to Yellow House a lot – I had it on repeat constantly. I had this whole surreal little world in my mind that I developed while listening to that album. It’s so magical, but it also has a weird Western-y, expansive, National Park feel to me.

So you designed the text to go with the photos? What did you do in terms of that?
They sent me all the photos – Ed actually wanted a different photo as the cover, a still life one with chairs in that ended up in the booklet. I suggested the photo which ended up on the cover because I thought it was far more magical and mysterious and inviting, so we agreed on that. And after we had the cover, the rest of it fell into place.

And you’ve been working with them ever since?
Definitely. I did the Friend EP, and now I’ve done the Veckatimest cover. And with this record, everything has gone through me. All the promotional materials, postcards, any little piece you see I had a touch in. The cover image is by an artist named William O’ Brien, who I think is friends with Ed’s ex-boyfriend from Chicago. He gave us permission to use his drawings, and there are about 60 in the series just like the cover that we’ve used for the album campaign.

What made you settle on that particular one out of 60?
Veckatimest is such a different record to Yellow House, both in the way they sound and in their aesthetics. Yellow House had so many lush layers and delicate arrangements, whereas Veckatimest is a lot more nuanced and varied. So we chose the cover image because of all its textures and shapes. It has a lot of movement, it’s very dynamic. It lets things speak for themselves.

Is that why the text is in strong capitals?
In a way, yeah. There were a lot of other proposals that were more throwback-ish, but they were too fussy, and distracted from the image. But having said that, the type itself is all hand-drawn. I worked with Amelia Bauer, and we drew everything I designed, just to give it a more unique feel than a boring computer-simulated text. Certain shapes form in the lines of the letters – you can kind of fall down through them.

Oh yeah! That’s really interesting – the Zs cross themselves in the same way as the drawings and the pictures seem to cross themselves. And if you squint your eyes the text takes on this polygon shape that appears in the drawings.
Yeah. The drawing is so abstract that we wanted the text to create a beautiful complement to the shapes in the picture, rather than distracting away from them. We talked about whether it would be weird that the words were broken up, but we kind of automatically agreed it doesn’t matter. People are gonna see the title everywhere else, and they sometimes get called The Griz anyways.

What about graphic design really turns you on?
I got into design because I really loved the design of Spin magazine and Wire Magazine and Non-Format and stuff like that. All I wanted to do was to be a music designer, and the fact that I’ve been able to do so much of that is really cool. But I really want to challenge myself at this point, I don’t wanna put myself into a corner. I’m only 22, I don’t wanna do music packaging for the rest of my life, I wanna do something where I get really scared shitless when someone asks me to do it. Doing the Grizzly Bear stuff has definitely opened up a lot of avenues for me. If you look at my portfolio at this point, you can see that almost everything that I’ve done since then – big or small – has tied back to Grizzly Bear. And I couldn’t be happier.

Thank you.

To see more of Ben’s work, check out www.wilkerton.com

Interview by Adam Baran.