Rob Baker
By default I got nominated as the art director for the band some years ago, which means taking care of designs for tee-shirts, album jackets and stuff like that. So I keep my eyes open for images that might turn everyone's crank. When I stumble across interesting images or whatever, I pass them around to the others and gauge their reactions.

For this record we were kind of struggling, looking for a title, a concept and some artwork. I had taken quite a few magazines out to the studio and one night sitting around and listening to playbacks of what we had done that day. I picked up this old American Photographer magazine and I saw this series of photographs by a guy named Avery Crounse. I said "here's a great photo" and passed it around. Later I said "the title of photo is pretty cool too." As soon as everyone got a glimpse of Trouble at the Henhouse everyone said it was great, "track the guy down."

The next morning I got on the phone calling directory assistance in Mississippi. Although Avery has a number there he also lives in California and that is where I talked to him. We have three photographs of his: Trouble at the Henhouse, Traveller's Omen and Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman is a cool photo that is going to be on tee-shirts. The other two we used as album artwork. There were about five other pictures that we really liked and we thought about using for this album, maybe Avery will let us put them up on the Net so everyone can see them.

- Trouble At The Henhouse

Avery Crounse Bio
Avery Crounse, a Kentucky native, is a photographer and a filmmaker. Portfolios of his photographic work have twice been published in American Photographer, he and his work have been the subject of a public television documentary, and his prints are in collections around the world.

Crounse has written and directed three feature films: Eyes of Fire, The Invisible Kid, and Sister Island. Eyes of Fire and The Invisible Kid have played worldwide and the World Premier of Sister Island is scheduled for June, 1996 at The Seattle International Film Festival.

Crounse's films are known for their visual imagery. The New York Times called Eyes of Fire wildly original and said "Mr Crounse's visual imagination is extraordinary." Many of the techniques utilized by Crounse in his films were first developed by him in the darkroom and can best be seen in his meticulously rendered prints.

Crounse, his wife, Chris, and their daughters, Caitlin and Erin, work together on both photographic and cinematic ventures. When not filming or photographing, the family splits time between the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and the coastal mountains of California where they are involved in various farming enterprises.

- Traveler's Omen

Sister Island (A Southern Mystery)
Written, Directed and Produced by Avery Crounse
Starring Kathleen York, Karen Black and Erin Buchanan

For his third film, writer-director Avery Crounse wished to devise a story which addressed the theme of human isolation, thus he constructed a plot around the discovery of a young women who had been almost completely cut-off form human contact. This character's severe isolation serves as an allegory for the loneliness of all the characters in the story and, in a broader sense, it is an allegory for the isolation and estrangement in our society.

Shooting in the swamps and marshes of the Mississippi Gulf Coast was a challenge for the crew, a group comprised of a handful of veterans from Los Angeles, various southern media centers and a diverse group of quick-learning locals. While the veterans were well-versed in film-making, it was the locals who had more experience with the heat and humidity, the swarms of insects, and the alligators and cottonmouth water moccasins that periodically visited the set. Despite twenty-five straight days of rain, the film finished on time.

In August, 1969, Hurricane Camille, the most powerful storm in North American history, strikes coastal Mississippi, a cultural and economic backwater along the Gulf of Mexico. Roads and bridges are destroyed; homes collapse; medical facilities are almost non-existent.

In the wake of the storm, rescue workers find a fifteen-year-old girl (later named Camille) lying comatose in the marsh mud next to a destroyed fishing community on a costal island. Dorrie Walsh, a female doctor recently returned to the area, takes the girl to a severely damaged medical clinic in a nearby town. At the clinic, the girl regains consciousness but appears unresponsive.

Dr. Walsh embarks on a detective's journey. In order to bring Camille into the world, to get her to speak, even to get her to recognize herself. Dr. Walsh must find out who the girl actually is, who her family is, and what harm they might have done to her. As Dr. Walsh accumulates clues, mainly derived from peculiarities in the girl's behaviour, she concludes from the mounting evidence that the girl is indeed from the island. But to what family does she belong? And why does everyone insist that they know nothing of her? In uncovering the mystery of the girl's origins, Dr. Walsh takes us deep inside the culture of the elusive island people where she unravels their secrets and exposes the truth of Camille's history. Now Dr. Walsh must use these truths to help Camille recover and Camille must find the courage to demonstrate her rehabilitation to a doubting world before she is taken back into a world of no hope.