Monday, June 6, 2011

Spring Summer Awesome Winter Cover Art

One day soon I'm going to release a new album, the second long player from this thing I call Bond Street Bridge. That day will be the 20th of June 2011, which is why I said 'soon.' I've been working on it on and off for a quite a while, in between things like sleeping in, feeding the cat, and cleaning out the fishtank, which keep me quite busy. It's going to be nice to have it out in the world, or at least out of the house.

The album, as I may have mentioned before, is called Spring Summer Awesome Winter.  If I told you in the past that it was going to be called something else, it's only because I tend to just say things out loud as they occur to me and often they turn out to not be correct.  Fortunately things don't occur to me that often, or I would talk even more than I do, and I don't think we need that.  Anyway, I think you'll agree that Spring Summer Awesome Winter is a better name than whatever I might have said before - the only problem was trying to think of something to put in the press release about why it's called that, because people will ask.  I can't remember what I said on that front, but the real reason is that it sounds cool.  The rest is just hype.

Making albums.  Really the best thing about making albums is that you get cover art, and if you need cover art the best person to go to is Ms. Millicent Crow.  She's supposed to be writing a thesis at the moment, which you will probably be aware is reasonably time-consuming, but we have invented a machine that makes a couple more hours in the day. (We called them 12a and 12b o'clock, in case you were wondering.  The best thing about these extra hours is that phone never rings during them, and the only other people on the internet seem to be experimental physicists).  We use one of those hours for general relaxing, and the other one is for things like making awesome cover art for albums.  Here's what Ms. Crow came up with for this one, using watercolours, ink and gouache:


This is the front cover. The red leaf has a halo because of how awesome it is. 


This is the inside, the bit you see when you open it up. Each picture illustrates something from one of the songs, so for example one song has a line about a cigarette lighter, and one has a line about a feather and so on and so on.  Incidentally, not many of the songs make a lot of sense now that I come to listen to them, but that will probably not come as a massive surprise to regular readers of this blog. People sometimes ask whether, given that the songs don't make a lot of sense in themselves, perhaps the things like feathers and cigarette lighters and so on might be metaphors for other things?  Possibly more sort of significant things, like beauty or truth or the nature of love?  The answer is no, they usually aren't.  They're only in there because they sound cool.  The rest is just hype.


This is the inside of the booklet that you pull out and have a look at while you're standing at the merch table in a dimly-lit bar after a show, trying to figure out whether I will shut the hell up and stop talking at you if you just give me the twenty bucks for the album, or whether that would only encourage me.  The answer is almost certainly the latter, but you should buy it anyway because of the awesome cover art.


This here is the back of the album (on the left) and the bit that goes under the tray that the cd sits in (on the right).  Now would be good time to reflect on how good the layouts are, which I think is this: pretty good. And I would say that, because I did them.  I don't think they're necessarily so good that you'd be surprised that I did them, but I also think that they're just about good enough that you'd wonder whether maybe I did about half a semester of design school part-time at one stage and then realised that it was too much work and dropped out. Which is pretty good, cos I didn't even. Look, there's even crop marks and a 3mm bleed and stuff, cripes.  If you pay me, I will do the layouts for your next record.  You will probably not even need to pay me very much; for somebody who has spent such an inordinately long time getting educated it is amazing how little I will work for.

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