On Cover Art

The old saw that we shouldn't judge a book by its cover seems strange now with e-books because they don't have a cover, per se. Digital music is also bereft of its packaging, which was at one time so central to the music experience: You could see photos of the band, read the lyrics, liner notes. We can still easily access this content on the net, albeit without the cachet that comes with having it nicely printed on a tangible surface--an attribute of information that is dying a slow death.

Cover art for books and music was always a 'push' phenomenon: You didn't have to request it--it was standard equipment. Now one wonders where it might be located. In fact, one can make their own visual experience that goes with the product, but is that a good thing, and who does it? Bjork has good intentions about letting the listener become a part of the creative process, but will they take the time to do it? It is at least a way to encode an aural experience with something deeper and persistent.

Creating something with a tangible object in mind informs the creative process at elemental levels and locates the work in a certain frame of understanding. Writers usually don't think about the cover of a book, but perhaps they should. When a screenplay is derived from a novel someone else is tasked with performing this operation--with varied results. It takes a consensus of pictures conjured in the readers' minds and curates them onto film. It converts the intangibility of imagination into a possible world in which the story was created.

While working on a new set of songs that have an African feel, I am doing a series of art pieces to get the music to 'look' a certain way.

Possible album art for (code name) 'Not Enough Africa':

Here is what this 'sounds' like:



People with synesthesia do this naturally, ergo it is a natural phenomenon--rare--but not an aberration. Creative people do this artificially as a temporary metaphor to lubricate the ideation process, and to operate in tangible way, rather than to work natively digital, which for many people can sometimes seem unmoored from the natural world.