words// carolyn hedlund image// johnny allen

A swaying weeping willow served as the picturesque backdrop to Drug Rug’s candy-sweet guitar licks and honey-soaked vocals during their concert in the Calderwood Courtyard at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, part of the Elaine and Jerome Rosenfeld Concerts in the Courtyard Series continuing throughout this summer at the museum. It makes sense that the duo finds itself playing such a world-renowned arts institution: Singer-guitarist Sarah Cronin is a dynamic visual artist herself. She is responsible for the dreamy artwork that adorns the band’s album covers and show posters, providing a visual identity that’s at times just as important as their dreamy indie-pop sound.

Cronin graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2005 for performance art and sound. However, it wasn’t until after graduating that she began drawing and sketching. The figures she draws are manifestations of herself—“Everybody makes art based on themselves”, Cronin says about the origins of these nymph-like creatures.

Drug Rug began using her artwork with the release of their 2007 self-titled album. Cronin says the push to do this came from the second half of the band, her boyfriend Tommy, which quite frankly sends their already skyrocketing cuteness into oblivion. When asked about the setting of the night’s concert, Tommy mentioned, “..it’s nice to finally have the SMFA pay us back for a change”, referring to the student loan payments that Cronin has been making towards her education, which I’m sure most of us share the burden of. However, not all of us are invited to play a concert at our debtor’s expense after graduation.

Drug Rug’s success as a band has helped Cronin as an artist. Before posting her paintings for sale on the band’s Myspace she had never sold a piece of her art. Inspired by comic books, she begins by sketching in storyboard form along with speech bubbles. Then she removes them, allowing her images to flow like a story without words. Cronin works mostly with pen and ink, but has recently experimented with watercolor. Her material choices directly reflect the progression of the band’s music. When Drug Rug employed a more dream-like ethereal sound on 2009’s Paint the Fence Invisible, her use of watercolors gave the album art the same quality.

The band is currently at work on its third album, recently recording at Coyote Hearing in Oakland, CA. They’re heading back to the studio in September, and are hoping for a Spring release date. About the decision to drop their additional band members, the duo says there was no bad blood. “We want to prove to ourselves that we can do it relying only on our own input,” says Tommy. They are looking to “simplify musically & artistically” for the new album, which can only leave one wondering about the new places this manifesto will take them.

Artwork by Sarah Cronin:

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For more information about Drug Rug, visit their website, or friend them on MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter.