Everlast’s “Peace of Mind” Pays Homage to Graffiti
Written by Emma Riva
Published on September 5th, 2026
In the music video for Everlast’s “Peace of Mind,” listeners will see bearded, cowboy-hat clad RISK painting on a wall, but he isn’t writing graffiti. Instead, RISK is buffing over tags with a white paint-roller as Everlast sings “In a world of hate, you gotta fight for love
Every night you pray but it’s not enough / When you beg to change and the Good Lord calls your bluff.” It’s an existential anthem for the hard-knock life. Rather than simply using a graffiti writer’s cameo for clout, Everlast’s connection to graffiti comes to it from honest life experience: He was once a writer himself.
“I started off as a writer in the late ‘80s, but music became a bigger obsession,” Everlast said. That obsession carried him around the globe, and finally back to Los Angeles, where he connected with artist Tristan Eaton and became a fixture in both the local street art and fine art communities. Everlast, who was born Erik Francis Schody, was formerly the frontman of House of Pain (of “Jump Around” fame) and performed under the name Whitey Ford. But all throughout his career, he’s been involved in the world of street art.
“Everlast wasn’t just an early collector of my work, he was an early collector of many street artists,” Eaton said. “He actually influenced a lot of other musicians to get on board collecting the street art and graffiti movement. This was in the early days of Kidrobot and Everlast’s support helped me break away from toys and into my painting career.”
Eaton also sees collaborations like RISK’s and Everlast as natural, given that musicians need visuals for their work. “Most people of my generation grew up transfixed by album cover art. Back when it was a physical object we would pour over every detail on our favourite artists tape of vinyl covers,” he reflected. “These days, the visual artist that a musician chooses can completely alter their brand identity and make a big statement. The visuals have always been extremely consequential to the audio and I love that.”
Embers to Ashes, Everlast’s latest album, is his first in eight years. In that period, his Los Angeles home burned down, he got divorced, and the pandemic upended the music industry and the world. Fellow rapper Yelawolf had approached him about producing an album at a performance in Berlin in 2015, and over a decade later, Embers to Ashes came to life.
The music video for “Peace of Mind” meditates on the themes of impermanence throughout the album. It celebrates that graffiti is ephemeral, but that fighting the buff is something all intrepid writers will keep doing no matter what, just as even in the face of suffering and tragedy, human beings have no choice but to keep living. Graffiti offers a powerful lesson about continuing to push on even when it feels futile. Also, it doesn’t hurt that it looks sick. It’s a lot more fun to meditate on life’s inherent fragility in front of a wall of spray paint instead of in a therapist’s office.
“Working on the video was a blast! Me playing the ‘buff man,’ my natural nemesis, was great! It really threw people for a loop,” RISK said. “Made me think of his song his song ‘What it’s Like,’ different scenario but definitely made me step out of my comfort zone and think about what’s going on in the buff man’s head.”
RISK and Everlast have known each other since the early nineties and are longtime friends. House of Pain was even one of the first bands to wear his clothing brand, Third Rail. So, the collaboration was natural.
“Risk is a good friend; we’ve done several projects. He fit the part and was all in,” Everlast said. During the music video, their friendship is clear through the fluidity of each of the parts they play. Neither look stilted or uncomfortable. The tags that appear on the screen sometimes read words, but other times are simply gestural style writing.
“It was fun to play off the beat, you can see one part where a stomp the roller to go with the beat, like gun shots. All that stuff comes natural as you listen to the song playing …you can’t help but get into it,” RISK said.
A key moment is at the beginning of the video, when the word AWARE appears on the wall and RISK then buffs it over, showing the ups and downs of progress. Embers to Ashes embraces the fact that even during hopeless, chaotic experiences, there is no choice but to move forward. Either you accept the buff and move on, or you tag over it.
“Whether it’s good or bad or in-between — this too shall pass,” Everlast wrote in a statement on Embers to Ashes. “Life’s great, you’re winning everything? Well, this too shall pass. Everything’s fucked up and you’re hurting? This too shall pass.”
But the one upside to that conundrum is that it’s universal. Everlast’s goal with Embers to Ashes was to talk about experiences every human being has, something especially timely during a moment where people are so divided. “I hope people take away a sense of being less lonely in their thoughts as we all are connected. That’s what music is for,” he said. Music and graffiti are both art forms everyday people encounter in front of them, and both have the power to change the course of someone’s day. After all, despite the animosity between them, both the buff man and the graffiti writer have to wake up each day and decide what to do with the twenty-four hours in front of them.
Check out the music video for Peace of Mind Here:
Everlast’s Embers to Ashes is out August 28, 2026, through Martyr Inc Records and Thirty Tigers.
Emma Riva is a writer, editor, and wine professional originally from New York and now based in Pittsburgh. She is the founder of Petrichor, an art magazine covering the arts and culture scene in Pittsburgh. Her work can be found in The Art Newspaper, Artforum, Whitehot Magazine, Newcity, and more.