You young whippersnappers might not be old enough to remember this, but there was a time when, in order to get music, we had to leave our homes. We’d go to these places called “record stores”, and paw through the bins looking for some rare treasure, like the Led Zeppelin single with “Hey, Hey, What Can I Do” on the B side, or, if you were really square like me, the Fleetwood Mac single with “Silver Springs” on the B side. And, of course, one of the most intellectually stimulating portions of this experience was looking at the album covers and trying to figure out how stoned the artist was when they drew it.
The point of this digression – well, I suppose it can’t be a digression because this is the beginning of the newsletter, but, hey, new horizons in narrative and all that – the point of this digression is that I am constitutionally incapable of producing an album without obsessing about the cover art, even though it’s doubtful that any of you will ever lay eyes on it. Music has ascended to its platonic ideal, in the sense that, for most people, it is now an art form that occupies a single sense – but I’m still stuck in that record store. And for my upcoming album, I’ve had the art in my head for three solid years.
You may or may not be aware that I design my own cover art. They may not be masterpieces – that would be reserved for the music itself, thank you very much – but they make me happy. I’ve been delighted with some of my concepts. For “Thirds”, I created a pie with slices made out of sheet music; for “I’m Not a Modest Man”, I made myself a cape and superhero insignia; and for “The Great Indoors”, I set up a lawn chair in my living room. The title of my upcoming album is “Bad Apple”, and for years, I’ve had this image in my head of a Granny Smith apple with devil horns, a trident, and a tail. Once again, I had to build the props – just try finding a one-inch set of devil horns on the internet. (Go on. Go look. Get back to me on that.) But although for previous albums, I also did my own photography, but I’m not a good enough photographer to take the sort of picture that I dreamed of for “Bad Apple”, the photograph that was glued to the inside of my eyeballs.
Fortunately, my friend Rob Mattson was up to the task. Rob is a marketing genius, man about town, a professional of diverse talents and commercial successes – and one of his occupations is photographer. He took one of the best live photos of me that’s ever been taken (and I swear I’m going to use it any day now, before I stop looking like me and start looking like my grandpa). Rob was the ideal choice to make my dream come true, and boy, did he – it’s like he climbed into my brain and Xeroxed what I was seeing. I’m not going to show you yet – I’m still obsessing about the fonts – but I can assure you, it looks exactly the way a devilish Granny Smith apple should look, and then some.
So check out Rob at https://downstageimages.com. He does a lot of portrait and live photography, and I know a number of the folks he’s photographed, and I can assure you that he makes them look far better than they actually look in real life, and, in fact, not at all like evil fruit. But, of course, if you’re looking for a great photo of evil fruit, he’s also your guy, and I have the pictures to prove it.