“…I’ll Take It To Mine”: The Untold History of Designing Take This To Your Grave
Fall Out Boy’s debut record features album artwork that has since been regarded as “the pop-punk Abbey Road,” but how did the fabled cover come together in the first place? From initial mockups to what’s often considered a modern-day classic, the full story has finally been compiled all in one place for the very first time. The Bad Habits Collection presents a deep dive into the never-before-seen history of Take This To Your Grave, taking you behind the scenes of designing one of the most iconic album covers of the 21st century with exclusive commentary by designer Mike Joyce of Stereotype Design.
In the fall of 2019, I set out to purchase a copy of the extremely limited, first-pressing of Take This To Your Grave on vinyl. This pressing of 1000 copies issued in 2003 included alternate album artwork for the front cover.
For those unfamiliar, this is the original intended cover for the record as photographed by Ryan Bakerink, but it was rejected by the band’s label—Fueled By Ramen—as it could not be legally cleared for use. It features lyricist and bassist Pete Wentz’s then-girlfriend Morgan asleep on his bed with 1980s toys and nostalgic references displayed throughout the bedroom. Both versions of the album cover were shot in the band’s apartment located in Roscoe Village in Chicago, Illinois.
When I got my hands on a near mint copy of the record for the first time, I was blown away by the attention to detail in the cover art. Before this article was published, the original album cover—also known as the “Girl in Bed” cover—existed online only in a highly compressed, nearly illegible format. It was a real treat to see in its full glory and after renting a professional scanner to digitize it for my online archive (as shown above), it dawned on me that somebody out there must have the original file.
Fast-forward nearly a year later and I was able to get in touch with Mike Joyce, designer for Take This To Your Grave and founder of Stereotype Design. Mike has generously shared several never-before-seen assets from the making of TTTYG exclusively with The Bad Habits Collection. The following is a complete dissection of these contents, their fascinating history, and the artistic process that guided the way.
Mike Joyce, designer for Take This To Your Grave, worked on indie album package designs in the mid-to-late-90s, including some work for NYC alternative metal band The Step Kings. After their eventual break-up, The Step Kings’ singer and bassist, Bob McLynn, formed a management company called Crush Management—whom Fall Out Boy has been working with throughout their entire career. As a fan of Mike and his work, Bob would go on to hire him to design the artwork for the upcoming debut album from Fall Out Boy, at the time, a relatively unknown softcore punk band from Chicago.
As part of this new project, Mike got on the phone with founding member of the band Pete Wentz and they discussed ideas for the record. Mike recalls, “Pete kept changing the name of the album and the cover designs changed with them.”
Originally, Pete had two titles in mind—one being To My Favorite Liar, as notably mentioned in a 2013 Alternative Press interview with album photographer Ryan Bakerink.
Mike shared two treatments with me for this title, the first of which was previously featured in a coffee table book from 2011 titled 15 Years of Fueled By Ramen.
“I was really inspired by Helmet’s Betty album cover,” Mike said, “how the imagery contrasted the band’s music so much. So that’s why I came up with the retro cocktail imagery and I had this idea of a couple seeming all-smiles and cheering to one another, but it’s really only a facade and they’re lying to each other and themselves.”
The second treatment shared with me for To My Favorite Liar focuses on a polygraph, commonly referred to as a “lie-detector test,” and was highly favored by Mike at the time. Up until now, this piece has never been seen by anyone outside of its original designer and Pete Wentz himself.
The other title Pete came up with at the time for their first studio album was Perfecting Regret.
Mike’s comprehensive layout for this title (as published previously in 15 Years of Fueled By Ramen) features a kid being roughed up by two other boys. Mike recalls, “[Pete] originally really wanted a bunch of guys fighting on the cover—like a street gang… Pete was a big fan of the cover photo for Simple Plan’s No Pads, No Helmets…Just Balls album. He wanted something similar to that style, but have the band in a four-way fist fight in a hotel room. He even talked about maybe renting an old-school gym with a boxing ring in it and having the band fight in the ring.”
Interestingly, this is a similar concept to the cover Fall Out Boy used for their original demo tape back in 2001, which features a still from the 1984 film The Karate Kid, in which the protagonist Daniel is being beat up by Johnny and the Cobra Kai gang. Both seem to perfectly encapsulate the spirit of the underdog, a mindset and lifestyle Fall Out Boy has been heavily rooted in from the get-go.
Despite Mike’s initial treatments, Pete still wasn’t satisfied and continued to suggest new titles and artwork concepts. Growing frustrated with Pete’s inability to decide, Mike took out a pen while sitting at his desk one day and scratched up a test pressing from another band he had laying around.
He ultimately loved how this beat-up 45 RPM single ended up looking and scanned it in to form the basis of the CD label artwork. The scanner bed itself can be seen underneath the vinyl record in this original scan from Mike Joyce’s archive.
To create the vibrant orange label featured on the disc, Mike scanned “a beat-up coaster I always put my coffee on.”
The end result meant the compact disc would emulate a worn-out vinyl record, tying in to the band’s lyrics on “Dead On Arrival” (a theme they would later revisit for “Favorite Record” on their sixth studio album American Beauty / American Psycho twelve years later).
Finally, Pete settled on an idea for the cover featuring his girlfriend at the time laying in his bed in the apartment he shared with the rest of the band.
Seen here for the first time in its full-digital format, the “Girl in Bed” cover is based on creative input from Pete Wentz, photographed by Ryan Bakerink, and features Morgan in Pete’s bedroom in the band’s apartment in Chicago.
As frontman Patrick Stump once put it, “If we ended up with the Abbey Road cover of pop punk, that original one was Sgt. Pepper’s.” The photo was purposefully staged with callbacks to things the band loved and nostalgic references they grew up with, such as a My Pet Monster plush hiding underneath the bed. Patrick Stump’s personal copy of Elvis Costello’s LP Armed Forces was strategically placed on the bookshelf by Ryan to help represent all of the different members’ influences. An NES cartridge of Frankenstein: The Monster Returns can be spotted in the bottom right corner, just below a full scale Darth Vader helmet, both of which were previously obscured by the band name and album title as shown in the vinyl cover.
It’s now made clear that Fueled By Ramen edited several logos and other graphic elements out of the original photo in an effort to avoid litigation—such as a design by Paul Frank on Morgan’s sock and the Transformers logo on the action figures Pete borrowed from a friend of the band whom fans know as Hey Chris. In the top left corner, to the right of a The Who poster, a local show flyer can be seen, featuring headliners Rise Against and Every Time I Die. (This would come full circle when both of these bands would go on to open for Fall Out Boy on their 2018 arena tour supporting MANIA.) Directly above Morgan’s head, a poster is displayed on the wall promoting American Nightmare’s debut album Background Music—a hardcore punk band fronted by Wesley Eisold (whom Fall Out Boy would later credit as “Inspirador” in the liner notes for From Under The Cork Tree and Infinity On High).
Pete was reportedly instantly satisfied with the new cover photo, but Fueled By Ramen was quick to raise concern, noting that the bedroom was littered with references that would never clear legally due to copyright concerns.
And that’s when Mike finally took the reins.
“It was getting pretty late in the game at this point and I remembered Pete telling me that the singer, his friend Pat, had this idea to make it look like an old Blue Note Records album. Out of all the photos Ryan sent me there was this one of the band sitting on their couch that struck me right away—I loved how their arms were crossed and how the singer’s feet were positioned and especially how the couch was bent and broken right down the middle. I quickly converted the full color photo to black and white and overlaid it on a field of 100% cyan. And then, really going for that Reid Miles vibe, I made their name a deep blue on top of black. It all came together in about an hour and the band loved it right away—especially Patrick.”
When discussing the design with Pete, Mike shared his intentions to write their names on the front cover. Pete agreed and further suggested Mike utilize the band members’ full names on the cover to help nail down “that old school Blue Note professional musician vibe”. Mike listed their full names in order of appearance on the cover as they were submitted to him by Pete, with Patrick famously requesting to leave the letter “h” off his last name, forever shaping his professional career as Patrick “Stump” instead of his legal family name “Stumph.”
Pictured here is Take This To Your Grave’s true “Blue Note” cover as provided in its full, original high-resolution glory by Mike Joyce.
“Once the cover was approved by [the] band, label, and management,” Mike said, “I fleshed out the rest of the package with pretty much no changes at all. I was thrilled, because I was really proud of the album design overall and never thought the ‘Girl in Bed’ photos worked for an album cover. I thought Ryan’s band and portrait photos were really strong and really striking and knew I could use them to create a bold, vivid, and memorable album cover.”
Ultimately, Pete was very happy with the “Blue Note” cover and personally approved each and every element Mike designed. Mike also recalls receiving a massive, sweaty post-show hug from Patrick after he introduced himself as the designer of TTTYG at the Continental, a tiny, now defunct bar in NYC.
Later on, Mike was contacted by Kyle Baker of Fueled By Ramen for his input on designing the first ever vinyl pressing of Take This To Your Grave. At the time, Mike was busy working on Iggy Pop’s Skull Ring and did not have time to contribute. Mike sent the label physical zip disks that stored the original files, which he could no longer access due to the antiquated technology. The team at FBR then made some edits and turned it into that rare vinyl cover we know today.
Circa 2006, the label also wanted to create a classic jewel case version of the Take This To Your Grave CD. When it was first released, Mike had only designed the album assets for the paper-based DigiPak format. Unfortunately, Mike was still slammed with other work and opted not to partake in its creation.
Without Mike overseeing the process, Fueled By Ramen eventually made some significant edits to the “Blue Note” album artwork that Mike had designed. AP’s 2013 Take This Back To Your Grave story included a quote from Pete noting that that not everyone in the band was sold on the idea of listing their legal names on the cover, a super uncommon practice in the modern era of records. Potentially as a result of this dissatisfaction, FBR truncated their full names to their common names while designing the jewel case artwork. In addition, for unknown reasons, perhaps even by accident, the names of the band members were rearranged, no longer in order of appearance.
In another unfortunate turn of events, the cover’s overall color profile has been significantly altered over the years into a blueish-green tint, as it currently appears on streaming services for example—a far cry from its original design intentions.
Regarding the color palette change, Mike said, “I’m not sure if they tweaked the colors over the years or if they just printed poorly, or if the various JPGs, GIFs, and TIFFs online have morphed into some hodgepodge of a blue/green spectrum, but the original pressing of the DigiPak is the closest I’ve seen to what I originally intended—although I’ve always thought it printed a little dark.”
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The visual storytelling of four scrappy boys living together in what Pete once recalled as “the worst apartment of all time” was the perfect backdrop for their iconic debut record, forever frozen as a moment in time worth revisiting alongside 12 groundbreaking tracks.
While nothing can replace the simple brilliance of the final artwork, it’s nevertheless interesting to imagine what could have been: a world where legions of polygraph tattoos proudly represent one’s favorite record, an alternate present where memories of these songs took the shape of favorite liars or regrets perfected. Since these themes are an integral part of Take This To Your Grave’s DNA, it’s no surprise they were early contenders in the design process. Mike could have taken this all to his grave, but 18 years later, I’m honored to be able to digitally preserve them here on public display.
The Bad Habits Collection would like to thank Mike Joyce for his time and contributions to preserving this piece of history. He is available for hire at https://www.stereotypenyc.com.
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