EMI Nashville If you check out the cover of Brothers Osborne‘s third album, Skeletons, which is out today, you’re actually looking at a John Osborne original. 

“TJ and I are very hard-headed and stubborn when it comes to, well, everything, involving Brothers Osborne,” John confesses. “You know, like a picture of just us, like, you know, thumbs up or like, you know, lookin’ all hunky dory, whatever, with our name, it just isn’t our thing.”

“We want to do things different in our own way,” John tells ABC Audio. “So trial and error, trial and error, trial and error and nothing ever quite worked.”

So John set out to see what he could do himself.

“I saw some pictures that looked really cool, this huge keyhole,” he explains. “I was like, you know, ‘I think — I’ve got time off. It’s quarantine. I’m not doing anything.'”

“And I went out to my shed,” he continues. “I had a bunch of spare wood. I got a jigsaw out and I cut a keyhole out of some plywood. And if you look at it, it’s just a piece of three-quarter-inch birch plywood. And I put it on top of another piece of plywood. I did some backlighting through it. And then that’s the original photo.”

“And then we just superimposed TJ and I — which is a picture that [our] sister took,” John adds. “And then [we] superimposed some clouds back there. But I still have the board at my house. It’s a board with just a keyhole cut in it.”

Skeletons features a dozen new songs from the CMA-and-ACM-winning Vocal Duo of the Year, including their current hit, “All Night.”

By Stephen Hubbard
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