The Sexy Mathematics origin story.

In 2006, my band recorded a CD. We spent the better part of a year and the price of a decent used car, and at the end of the tortuous process I took the six boxes of completed CDs and piled them up into a little pyramid in the middle of my living room floor. “Now what?” I said.

Three and a half of those boxes are still in my possession, tucked into a corner of my hall closet. The truth is, we never really thought about what we would do with the CDs once we’d finished making them. I guess we figured we’d sell them to somebody. But since the recording of our CD coincided with the effective end of our public performing career, it became increasingly difficult to find customers. If it weren’t for the popularity of a few animated cartoons I posted on YouTube, we wouldn’t have sold a single disc to anyone outside our immediate families and friends.

I work with a guy named Chris whose band, Sexy Mathematics, just finished recording their first EP. Unlike me, Chris isn’t willing to hang onto his boxes of CDs forever. He has a plan for unloading them. The first step of his plan was to come to me. “Hey, you’re in the marketing biz,” he said. “Would you write some promotional copy for our press kit?”

“Pshh, that sounds boring,” I said. “Why don’t I make you a promotional comic instead?”

So that’s what I did. Oddly, this is far more work than I ever undertook to promote my own band. It’s easier, somehow, to motivate myself to do things like this for other people than it is to do them for myself.

Perhaps someday I’ll create a promotional comic for the band known as Sea Water Bliss. But probably not. I hate repeating myself.

The Origin of Sexy Mathematics