Covered Up
While we’re on the subject of symbolic orders of language, and I’m finalising an album for release, let’s turn to album covers.
Firstly, given that very few people actually essay physical releases nowadays it’s amazing they’re still such an important feature especially as we’re now a long way from their double-gatefold poring over the liner notes for information / clues / hints and looking at the artwork heyday.
But they’re still a thing.
Even if only as a thumbnail on a platform streaming service, music is released with artwork.
It’s part of a package where the artwork and its imagery reflects, at its best (and also at its worst) the music inside.
What’s interesting if you dig a little deeper is that the artwork that is released with music is as overwhelmingly defined by genre conventions as the music itself.
In much the same way that the books we still buy in various forms are universally organised into cohorts defined by genre and sub-genre formats at the writing, signing and editing phases, so to the picture you see as you click play is defined by the genre the musician / band works in.
With books, the words you read are not necessarily the flowerings of literary genius and expression, but a set of sequences worked into the appropriate format.
The memoir, for example, now universally starts with a moment of climax or jeopardy before going back to the start and then showing, usually in a series of set prescribed steps or beats, how we got here from there. The route is as along stepping stones: the early years and influences; wonderful childhood / crap childhood; the appearance of a path; the appearance of a mentor or antagonist - if the antagonist arrives first, the mentor will arrive later and vice versa; then a first triumph or setback; then how it led to a moment of doubt or moment of overcoming … and so we wind a long, weary and formulaic way back to where we came in with wounds licked, scores settled, scars healed and now worn proudly because lessons have been learned. If it’s a pop star, throw in some cautionary tales about drugs and booze hells, moneys lost, divorces happened, etc. If it’s a politician, expect endless justifications about how they were right and noble and just all along - even when it’s Matt ‘I shxgged someone who wasn’t my wife while other people didn’t get to see or hold their children and 200,000 people died’ Hancock.
Fantasy literature?
Yes, but enough about Matt Hancock’s ouevre.
Actual Fantasy Literature?
Same deal.
The hero emerges, often from where it is least expected; the threat; the challenge; the early step; the mentor, the escalating series of challenges that test the hero and their merry band of sidekicks and prepare them for the final climactic showdown, but can you make sure that you can stretch this to a trilogy at the very least please because three books will make us more money than one even if you’ve only got the premise and material for one?
(And if you’re George R.R. Martin, why not start a perfectly reasonable little story with a perfectly reasonable little premise and then let it spiral wildly out of control as you colour in all of the spaces on the map until its so big that you can’t finish it?)
Writing the back to nature thing? Please tell us what you learned about giving up all electronic devices / money / relationships / coffee / and going to live in a log cabin in Ireland / the Lakes / a nice rural place where the people are rural and the land is rural and there is an old folk wisdom that we’ve all lost with our houses and our thermostats and our smart devices and our cars that we really should get back to. Tell us all about what we should all be doing as you write about your year in a field / wood / hedge / area of coastal erosion while shoehorning as many facts as wikipedia can give you about the local flora and fauna while you write to meet your deadline for an October release to catch the ‘bought for a nephew who is sort of into this but who I don’t really like that much’ Christmas market.
(Professional academic here: wikipedia is not a valid academic source. Nature writing involves not the recycling of known facts from Domain / Kingdom / Phylum / Class/ Order / Suborder / Animal Families / Genus / Species down to pad out your chapter, but expanding our understanding of the natural world or our understanding of our interaction with it. Write something that changes your life, and it might just change the lives of your readers.)
And so on and so forth.
As the man who set up the most famous writing school in the UK told me: you don’t need anything to be a writer but a pencil. But if people want to be validated by getting a piece of paper to say that they’re a writer, who are we to turn down their money? In return we’ll give them structures and forms and genre conventions and so on, and in return you’ll get writing that’s all the same.
Well, there’s something similar applies to album covers.
Let’s say you’re a thrash metal band.
Your album and press release will have a shot of you glowering in black outside some downtown post-industrial warehouse complex just to show how urban and street and gritty you are - even if you are, in fact, Metallica, are established multi-millionaires, and you only see the streets when you’re being driven through them in the back of a limo. Font is either the band logo or Gothic, or preferably both.
Are you the Swedish guy who has been dominating Spotify by using AI to generate tracks before putting them out under a variety of assumed names? Got some stuff that fits in the Ayahuasca tourist thing? Here’s a picture of a shaman who is also a jaguar emerging from a rootsy jungle painted in psychedelic colours. Get that content out there! Font is vine leaves. Or mushrooms.
You know, because, psychedelics …
Sensitive singer-songwriter? Here’s a shot of you looking to three o’clock soulfully and into the middle distance. Possibly in black and white. Probably. Font is new but retro, like a recherche Garamond.
Folksy duo? Here’s you and your partner in the Greenwood / Meadow / By the riverbank + looking winsome + clutching your instruments. Font is flowery, circa 1969 when Fairport Convention et al and the idea of moving to the country to get it all together was a thing that rock icons and folk musicians were doing.
Guitar player?
Here’s a shot of you looking mean with your axe.
Unless you’re Steve Vai, in which case there’ll be a spiritual element.
(But it still won’t be Passion and Warfare.)
Acoustic guitar player?
Here’s a shot of you looking intensely artistic with your very expensive chunk of wood and wire. Probably in black and white. Perhaps you’re holding it by the neck and looking into the camera. Perhaps you’re cradling it as you might a lover and looking at the space between the neck and the heel (which is where all the good notes are). But it’s a man (usually) and his guitar.
Yeah.
Have you read my thoughts on the invention of the guitar hero?
The manipulation of wood and wire has now been going on since the fifties. What have you actually got to say that isn’t a marketing pitch for spruce and rosewood and is actually relevant - to you, to anyone?
Now, I’m exaggerating a little for comic effect.
Yes.
We know art has forms.
And we know that the fastest way to generate something is to follow a recipe.
A formula.
But we also know that while following a formula helps us to generate things quickly, it’s also a trap, because formulas are predictable.
Buy two Bernard Cornwell books.
Put them back to back.
Write down where each bit of action happens. When disaster strikes the village / hero. When the hero leaves the village. When the stranger appears. When the mission begins. When the mission goes wrong. When the heroes need to regroup. When a decision is taken. When it all rests on this throw of the dice.
Anglo-Saxons. Vikings. English yeoman. Rifleman. Roman.
Same books.
Same beats.
Same places.
That’s great.
We like what we know.
But it’s also why although you might have started Cornwell’s Uthred series, by the time the world’s oldest Viking was still trying to get back to Bamburgh and cursing his fate / oaths made to Alfred / taking his place in a shieldwall in a desperately climatic battle / etc, you’d long since stopped caring.
I am a singer-songwriter who writes primarily with acoustic guitar, and my music comes from folk / acoustic traditions.
So my album cover should be me staring into the middle distance while cradling a lump of wood and wire, right?
Here’s the cover for Northumbria.
It’s an image taken from Mark Bradshaw’s portfolio.
Mark Bradshaw is a world-class award-winning landscape photographer based in the North-east.
Note the lack of me.
Note the lack of guitar.
Now, Songs for Separation is coming out at the end of this month.
Here’s the image I’ve selected for the cover.
It’s an image of two wild horses fighting at Sand Basin.
Note again the absence of acoustic guitar.
Note again the absence of me.
How does it fit into the genre conventions?
Well, it doesn’t.
Genre conventions are great. It means we can pick up a book or piece of music or put on a movie and roughly know what to expect, which once we’ve moved into adulthood tends to be stuff that we know we’re going to like.
But …
Album art used to representative, bold, experimental, and in search of the perfect image for the moment. Peter Blake in the sixties. Hipgnosis in the seventies. Saville with Factory in the Eighties. Create an aesthetic. The aesthetic comes to represent the art.
In a world of everyone saying look at me, I don’t need my face on something to know I made it.
And nor do you.
I don’t need a picture of me holding a guitar to know I play one.
And nor do you.
And the cover I’ve got for Test Pieces is a belter.
©℗ A. I. Jackson
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Origin(al) Stories was first launched to show some of the thoughts, decisions and processes that went into the writing, recording and release of the Northumbria album.
Following the launch of The Landing Stage, which brings together some of the things I do, I’ve continued adding to Origin(al) Stories.
Origin(al) Stories has none of the features beloved of self-help and influencers: how-to guides, lists, essential hacks.
Drawn from my personal diaries and journals, the posts might often seem unconnected, elliptical and fragmentary. Showing, as they do, my explorations of ideas and approaches and processes as I do things, they are best viewed as glimpses of my workings.
They show my mistakes, the false trails I’ve followed, and the blind alleys I’ve gone down - all of which are intrinsic parts of finding a path through to doing something.
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