My cousin Sid ran Urinine Records, an indie record label in that began when he was in Indianapolis but was, at this point, now operating from his home in Kansas City. My friend Michael—also from Indianapolis and also now living in Kansas City—had been designing the label's releases, but when he passed on the next project, Sid needed someone else. I asked him why he'd never considered me. He said he thought I was too professional to work for $200. I told him I'd love to. At the time, I was working in a job I hated while trying to build a design portfolio on the side. Two hundred dollars sounded pretty good to me.

The project was a tribute to Supertramp called The Wrong Way Home, a play on Take the Long Way Home, one of my favorite Supertramp songs. I loved the title, and, honestly, it felt a lot like my life at the time. I was spending half of my time on the road, driving all over the Midwest, and living out of hotels. I hated being on the road, but with my marriage falling apart, I wasn't particularly excited about going home, either.

In December 1999, a business trip took me to Chicago, so I brought along my grandfather's Canon AE-1 to shoot photographs for the album. I hadn't used the camera—or shot with film—since my photography courses in college a few years earlier. Had I not been going to Chicago, I'd probably have wandered around Kansas City looking for subjects. But Chicago turned out to be the perfect place to be lonely with a camera.

I spent my evenings photographing El stations, escalators, people-movers, empty bars, elevator buttons—pieces of a city that seemed to be perpetually coming or going. Except for one shot, nobody appears in the photographs, and even the people in that one look like they're traveling alone. There was something about all those places meant for passing through, rather than staying, that felt right for the album.

For the insert, I arranged six photographs into warm and cool groups, with a mirrored image of a green, underlit awning running across the top. I'm not sure why I chose the awning. Maybe its sickly color suggested a kind of nausea or wooziness that felt appropriate. I wanted the photographs to do the heavy lifting, so the type is decidedly minimal—about as nonexistent as I felt I could get away with. Turning WRONG upside down seemed obvious enough, particularly when I realized its inverted W could tuck right up against the W in WAY. The large fields of black added to the feeling of emptiness I was after.

I don't remember presenting other concepts or even exploring many alternative images. Sid gave me the freedom to run with the concept, and two months later, the artwork went to press as presented.