The story of Daniel Johnston’s ‘Hi, How Are You?’ drawing
“Hi, how are you?” – Those are the words that open Daniel Johnston’s 1983 album of the same name, and which have forever since been inextricably linked to the album artwork, drawn by Johnston, which took on a whole life of its own as a small cartoon frog.
Johnston drew all of his early album artwork himself, usually line drawings done in marker or pen, but the artwork from Hi, How Are You? has long since been the best known and most loved of all his artworks.
The frog character, known as Jeremiah The Frog Of Innosense (or occasionally Jeremiah The Innocent Frog), was first brought to life by Johnston in 1983 when, while working as a ride operator at the AstroWorld theme-park in Houston, Texas, he found an old discarded rubber stamp box in the bin which depicted an image a frog alongside the phrase “Hi, how are you?” when pressed to paper. You could say that he took inspiration from the stamp, or perhaps more accurately, you could say that he simply copied its design outright.
Johnston took a liking to the frog image and began to draw his own amphibious character, who famously has two eyes on snail-like antennae rather than resting in his face like a real life frog would, and who was eventually named after the Three Dog Night song ‘Joy to the World’, which opens with the lyrics “Jeremiah was a bullfrog”, although it’s not clear who gave the frog this name. As well as featuring on the cover of Hi, How Are You?, Jeremiah has hopped onto T-shirts, murals and graffiti, figurines, apps, and even film.
Hi, How Are You? was Johnston’s sixth album, and his sixth self-recorded and released work, and only his second to feature standardised recordings of his tracks, as, up until 1983, he did not have the means of making copies of his songs, meaning that each cassette he produced featured entirely unique recordings of each individual track.
Though Johnston always remained something of a cult artist, his music has had a broad impact, and he can count many influential names amongst his fans. Songs from Hi, How Are You? appeared in Richard Linklater’s 1988 film It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books and his 1990 movie Slacker.
Two years later, Kurt Cobain was seen wearing a T-shirt on which Jeremiah The Frog Of Innosense was squiggled on the front, alongside the gentle question “Hi, how are you?”, bringing fresh attention to the album and to Johnston’s other music, as well.
Cobain even went as far as to suggest that Johnston was “the greatest songwriter on earth”. Johnston, of course, was enthused by the acknowledgement, saying that “somebody gave me a Xerox copy of the picture and I had it hanging on the wall. It was a big deal because it was the MTV Awards!”
Following on from his newfound popularity, a mural of Jeremiah and the Hi, How Are You? album art was unveiled near the University of Texas at Austin in 1993. In 2024, the building which housed the mural was demolished, all except for the section of wall which features the drawing of the innocent frog.
