Daniel Johnston's 'Hi, How Are You' Mural

In 1993, Daniel Johnston — the Austin-based outsider artist and musician — painted a mural on the exterior wall of the Sound Exchange record store at the corner of Guadalupe Street and West 21st Street, depicting a variation on the cover art of his 1983 cassette album Hi, How Are You: a simple, haunting frog-like creature he called 'Jeremiah the Innocent', staring outward from the wall with enormous eyes. The mural quickly became one of Austin's most beloved pieces of public art. Its profile exploded when a photo of Kurt Cobain wearing the Hi, How Are You T-shirt was widely circulated after Nirvana's 1992 MTV Unplugged performance, raising Johnston's international profile overnight and turning the frog into an emblem of something larger than itself.

Daniel Johnston (1961–2019) was a singular figure in American music and art — a man who recorded lo-fi cassette albums on cheap equipment in Austin in the 1980s and distributed them by hand, building a devoted following before anyone was paying attention to him commercially. He lived with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia throughout his life, and his songs — raw, funny, heartbreaking, and deeply personal — became cult objects passed between people who felt they contained something true that polished pop music didn't. He was championed by Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo, and Cobain, among others. His story was told in Jeff Feuerzeig's 2005 documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston.

The building that hosted the mural was demolished in 2023 by a student housing company. However, the mural wall itself was preserved in place as a condition of the development agreement, and the mural continues to stand on a concrete slab at the corner site. Austin Creative Alliance holds a restrictive covenant pledging to preserve the mural in perpetuity and integrate it into the new building's design. Johnston died in September 2019; January 22 is now observed annually in Austin as Hi, How Are You Day.