Why I Wear The Paint
Grief, music and an explanation for the past few years of a creative life exploring contrasts.
In January of 2020, I was living with my eventual wife Olive and our roommate in East Atlanta, still on unemployment from COVID and working on a concept album about the healthcare industry called Death is Free, which was never completed.
I had been putting out music under the name Seal Pup for a little while and was beginning to feel bored and stagnant with the project. I realized what I needed to get energized artistically was a complete reinvention. It would need to be both more calculated and more earnest than anything else I’d ever done.
I made the decision to start going by Jake Cook for the first time, and to make the most high concept, indisputably amazing music of my life.
We found a nice Casio for $50 at Goodwill. I put down the guitar I had used to write Seal Pup material and started messing with the keyboard and writing new songs.
I already knew keys and had made this switch many times in my musical life to shake things up, but this time I really challenged myself to learn and play the instrument in a way I never had before.
I knew whatever I released next was going to be my first project under my own name and I wanted it to concisely sum up all the dynamics of my life and my entire perspective.
The goal was to make artsy, fucked up pop music that played with and really leaned into heavy contrast.
Succession, the TV show, was airing its last season. We were watching that, as well as reruns of It’s Always Sunny. I had the realization that both of these shows are about unrepentant assholes, followed by a second realization that actually most media is about that.
I started thinking about making a concept album that dealt with what it means to be a bad person. I guess I was imagining I could craft an interesting addition to the monolithic pile of treatises on this subject which stretch back to the beginning of recorded history. Because this work would be about me, and my own personal journey from misanthropic crankdom to…what, exactly? I was figuring it out.
All I knew was the title: J E R K S, all caps, with spaces between each letter to be extra obnoxious.
When an idea appears to me from the ether, I don’t ask questions. I just start walking and feeling around in the direction of where I believe will eventually be a good place to end up.
So I started writing and recording this album I had thought of, about the path of a very disagreeable man into enlightenment and redemption.
Like most album projects, I thought of this as a movie. I knew I wanted it to be a narrative story with a clearly defined arc where the main character is a jerk. The question I had to answer was, how much of a jerk was this person? Is he merely oblivious to the people he harms, or is he full-on sadistic and abusive? And if that’s the case, what could possibly be the cathartic event that spurs the revelations necessary to be in a different place at the conclusion?
What’s the narrative turning point, and why? I wrote all around it trying to figure out.
During the early stages, I had an idea for a photo shoot with one of my best and oldest friends, Noah Orisich. I would dress up with corpse paint and wear a suit. It was supposed to be a juxtaposition of two distinct types of disagreeable humans: business executives and gatekeeping black metal purists.
The shoot went excellent. No surprise when Noah is involved. In his organic and skillful style, he captured everything. There’s a reason I’ve worked with him so much throughout the years, besides our close friendship.
Looking at the pictures for the first time, I started to understand what I was doing.
I had the idea to incorporate the corpse paint and suit outfit into my live shows. The initial idea was that this would be a way to feel like more of an artist, and provoke reactions by doing something unexpected.
The more I wore the paint, the more meaning revealed itself to me. Things I had never intended when I first made the move, as mostly an aesthetic choice.
The black and white representing contrasts. The idea that I was both going my own name for the first time and committing to performance in a way I had never done. The concept of exploring performative depression, and what we do to make our outsides look like our inside. It was all clicking together and coming into focus.
I was playing drums in SMALL with Olive and Samm Severin at the time. We had just released the album, Decathexis. I made the decision to quit the band, partially to focus on this new project I was envisioning.
The last SMALL show I played was at The Earl and I had an amazing time. I wore the paint. I asked Olive if she thought it would be crazy if I started wearing the paint even when I wasn’t performing. It was a whole thing I wanted to start doing.
She said maybe it was crazy, but that she supported it.
I started wearing the paint to other people’s shows, or get-togethers with friends. If people ever asked me about it, I tried to change the subject quickly. I thought explaining it would only make me second guess what I was doing. Interrogating my reasons for doing this felt like it would only block the real answers from being clear.
The motivation was totally obvious to me: it was something I felt like doing, and so it was important that I follow that instinct as an “artist”.
This all felt really vital to me at the time.
In the midst of all this, something crazy happened. White Dog died.
Olive’s beloved dog, who I loved like a son and had effectively adopted, was suddenly diagnosed with lymphoma and given five weeks to live.
Olive was on set for some job that day and I had to tell her. It was awful.
We had been engaged for months but hadn’t told anyone, so we took the opportunity to throw an engagement / “Goodbye White Dog” party. Slightly weird in retrospect, but it felt like the right thing to do.
We both wore white. Everyone gave White Dog lots of love and snacks at the party. I think he had an amazing night.
The next day, by the way White Dog was acting, it was clear that it was time. The following morning Olive called a mobile vet who put him to sleep in our living room while we cradled his sweet sick body.
They zipped him up and we drove him to a piece of land in North Georgia owned by Olive’s family and buried him. It was so quiet and peaceful in the holler that is White Dog’s final resting place. All you could hear that day was me and my future wife, crying and digging a six foot hole for a precious baby gone too soon. I’ll never forget it.
Soon after, I did a show at Waller’s Coffee Shop where I played my set between two big pictures of White Dog placed on easels. I wore all white, like on the night of our engagement party. I talked about White Dog throughout the performance.
I did not wear the paint that night. I didn’t need to. It was on the inside.
The whole thing really fucked me up. I had lost both parents, and was no stranger to grief, but this was different. White Dog never did anything to anybody. There’s no possible way he could have incurred a karmic debt which would justify this sudden sickness and early death. It just wasn’t fair.
Whatever your depressive inclinations, there’s really nothing like a grief. It’s just a big monster that destroys everything.
Without W.D., the house was immediately bigger and lonelier than ever. A black and white cat appeared on the night we got back from the burial. Slightly delirious, we started feeding her and letting her stay in the house. We named her Cow. She was little asshole who bit our feet under the coffee table but we didn’t care. It was nice to feel something besides sad.
That Winter, Cow stayed with us and we fattened her up. In the five months we had her, we never took her for a checkup. She was from the street so we figured she was probably fine.
One day, she got a bad cough out of nowhere. She was hiding in the garage and I went to look for her. When she finally emerged from the darkness and approached me, the look she gave me said everything.
We took her to the emergency vet and were told she was moments from death because of a common respiratory thing.
I paid to get her put down. We left with our new pet in a box. The next day, we buried her in the backyard.
Life started to feel to both of us like a prank of some kind.
After more writing and and crying and processing, it occurred to me that what I was feeling was the key to completing the album which I had been thinking of as my magnum opus.
The cruel scythe of mortality offered the perspective shift my main character needed to get him where he was going for the final act.
My real life paralleled this.
I made it through this period because of the love of my partner. She was also the reason it was happening.
Love begets tragedy begets grief begets love again. Will the circle be unbroken. The black dog of depression hounding me at every turn. The White Dog of love, going from the physical plane of existence into my heart (He got that dog in him).
The contrast. The yin and the yang. The two colors of the corpse paint.
I finally had what I needed.
J E R K S came out in September 2023 and it remains the thing I set out to make; a concise distillation of my tastes, creativity, skills, talents, artistic sensibility and emotional intelligence.
The album perfectly documents how drawing self worth from my exceptional brain power at a young age was both responsible for a lot of psychic damage and sometimes my only salvation.
Through using a loose story structure for a character outside myself, I was able to earnestly relate to others all the ways I learned to be a better human being through love.
The writing process for my most authentic album ever was blood-splattered, visceral and all over the place.
Some careful editing occurred to make the finished product. In the end I cleaved out the most “contrast-y” of the songs. Songs about suicide, abuse, trauma and burying White Dog, but also songs about self-care and perseverance in the face of tragedy which I felt didn’t quite fit into the story I was trying to tell.
Over the past two years, I remixed these songs, retracked a bunch of things, fleshed out a sequence and finally crafted a sister album to J E R K S called S K E R J.
It’s J E R K S backwards, almost. It represents going back to where it all started.
The “White Dog dying” era of my artistic life has come to a close. Olive and I finally got married in October of 2025. A couple years ago we adopted Momo and Woodie, our two tabby cats. They’re happy and healthy and will likely live to old age.
Needing to see the S K E R J project to its completion before releasing anything else has created a significant bottle neck of unreleased material. I’m eager to start turning my focus to these things and getting them out there as soon as possible.
I’ve been doing this music shit since I was a child. Throughout the most violent and formative events of my life, it was the thing that I felt like defined my personhood.
I have no idea where I’m going next musically, but I’ll never stop walking or start asking questions.
Keep an eye out for S K E R J, releasing April 4th 2026.
From Atlanta,
Jake Cook
Yeah man. I just feel this on many levels. As a...parent...of dogs and cats. As an artist. Yeah.
Hell yes