My name is Jeff Wells, I provided design and illustration for "A Fine Mess" . As you can tell by the wealth and abundance of material hosted on this site, a lot of hard work and inspiration was poured into it's making.

In the summer of 1998 David Baerwald contacted me via e-mail and asked if I would meet him in at his Palindrome Recorder Studio in Venice, CA. to discuss an art directors assignment. In fact that project was his new disc an assembling of material he had produced over the last five years. He had seen a painting I had posted on Dan Heatherly's official "The David Baerwald Info Source" in 1997. The painting titled "The Too Late Rites (after Boomtown's "Swimming in the Ocean") was originally created for a freelance Art Director for Rolling Stone Magazine. The piece had an "Aids and Armageddon" theme, which was supposed to accompany an article regarding Baerwald's 1993 "Triage" release. The article ran sans an illustration. I had hoped the exposure would help display my artistic style to an age group and culture I felt capable of entertaining. As the lord works in mysterious ways, instead it led to my initial involvement which would latter evolve into "A Fine Mess" .

I had absorbed David's music since 1986's "Boomtown". I reveled in the brilliant solo career that followed, then vanished, with the exception of Sheryl Crow's "Tuesday Night Music Club", a film role in the Sean Penn directed "The Crossing Guard", Soundtrack songs notably a David & David recording for the "Posse" soundtrack which I assume was nabbed from the sessions from the aborted second David + David CD, "Toughest Whore in Babylon"( which is speculated to be about Sheryl Crow) from "She's So Lovely", Sean Penn, John Travolta and as a producer on Sussanah Hoffs' first solo outing which gave birth to the perfectly blessedness of "Darling One" . But where was the follow up to the brilliant 90's icon "Triage" ? What happened to the all those shady characters on the edge of life as Baerwald painstakingly told their stories.

After thumbing through the cd bins of music store proprietors in vein for 5 years, that same project I had dreamt about with exhaustive anticipation was now on my drawing board.

The elements of this site are two years plus in the making. It is the process of putting to paper and electronic medium the cinematic imagery David 's Characters have burned into my artistry. "A Fine Mess" turned out to be something completely different than I had originally envisioned it to look. What's beautiful about AFM, is that it just became itself through a lot of hard work and effort. We basically let the creative buzz motoring it lead us to it's own preferred destiny. I can't lay it down any cleaner than that. This chapter of my site is a testimony to the labor of love David Baerwald's music has created.

There were a lot of creative moments which took place in me during this project. I remember David chuckling at my dark, masochistic, brooding ideas saying, "Who in the hell is this Guy!" I originally wanted to carry on the Rowan Moore direction in the beginning , which is why allot of Pre-Mess has that edgy dark wandering feel to it. Triage's design is possibly one of the most influential pieces for me to this date . I had launched my career as a designer for specialty packaging. It was time that I set aside my illustration intuition and opened my eyes to the brilliance of "clean simplicity". Black and White has this almost mysterious attentive appeal, it brings you into that journalistic platform to arrest from. Things are taken much more serious given Contrast after all that is what "A Fine Mess" turned out to be... a striking difference between things being compared.

Jeff Wells • Burbank, CA 2000

*Pre-Mess, will take you through designs prior to the "A Fine Mess" title establishment. *Mess compiles material created for the "A Fine Mess" 2 disc set including extras.

Hope you'll find the journey an interesting one.

JW