My wife Jill is a graphic designer and photographer. She has created almost all my album covers for the last 20+ years. Here’s the story of a few of them.
Amped ‘93
Amped ‘93 is about songs that impacted me in 1993 (when I turned 17). That same year I bought a second hand 12-string guitar that I still have in my recording room.
That guitar has been with me in multiple cities, and came with me to America (and then back again), so it felt appropriate to make it a part of the cover art for this project.
We talked about “defacing” it in some way — like getting a tattoo — to celebrate the occasion of this release.
The original Tanglewood 12-string I bought in 1993.
Jill also wanted this cover to mirror the kind of “heart on your sleeve” grunge attitude that was so prevalent in music in the mid-90 (particularly among teengers like me).
In the end Jill had me write more or less evocative fragments of my lyrics from songs on the EP into the guitar, laid out irregularly and with my clumsy handwriting, before she photographed it for the final image.
Long Night of Love’s Life
This EP is actually a single, 25+ minute long song about the first night I spent in America with Jill, jet-lagged and exhausted, as I wandered around her student house.
At the time Jill was finishing up her photography degree, and was producing very intense and disorientating images of herself by torchlight, with very long-exposures.
This cover is one of those images, at the same moment confusing, fascinating and beautiful to me, which suited an EP about Jill perfectly.
First Days’ Love Songs
The First Days’ Love Songs theme was about the thrill of the potential of new relationships. When I thought about it, it felt like this was typified by the very first contact between two people as a relationship starts – Two hands touching – glancing and delicate.
Jill took this photograph of her own hand and mine, speaking both to the idea of that first gesture in general, and our own relationship specifically.
Needs a Band
This cover image was actually a photograph of a t-shirt Jill had herself designed for me, and I had regularly worn to try and find new musical collaborators in the city of Boston where I had only recently moved.
It was a great, lighthearted tool to strike up conversations with other musicians, but this cover was doubly amusing to me, because ironically in the end the album Needs a Band was created by myself and a new collaborator, Stephen, with friends contributing, but without any real band at all.
That Night with Golding 