Album Covers

It seems like music albums are slowly becoming irrelevant in the high speed internet era. Even still, I like the concept of an album of songs, even if it is primarily a music industry plot to suck more dollars from the consumer. Songs seem stronger when they're listened to in context of the album, Pink Floyd especially. Admittedly, not all artists weave an album's songs together or use a musical or lyrical thread like Pink Floyd did, but at least the songs typically share the same producer, engineering, and time frame in which they were composed.

Another great part of having an album is the album cover. The band Yes had albums that featured some cool art, and Led Zeppelin IV's cover is instantly recognizable.

During one summer of boredom, I wrote some techno-like music using this MIDI application called MusikTyme and put mini-albums on my Geocities page, consisting of three musically-connected MIDI songs and a custom-made album cover. I could have put more than three songs per album, of course, but then I wouldn't have been able to make as many album covers (which I enjoyed as much as writing the songs).



The songs on each album would fit the cover. For example Old School Fool featured a song reminiscent of the Theme from Shaft, Return to India contained faux Eastern-sounding melodies, Back From Helk's songs had a lot of dissonant sounds, and so on. Man, I wish I still had those MIDI files--not that it's great music, but just so I can appreciate the effort and thought I put into the songs.

Some equally boring summer later I felt compelled to do some more Squaz material. Rather than waste my time writing more songs, though, I decided to just make album covers. As you can tell, I got a lot of inspiration from images on my family's computer.



The whole reason I bring up my album cover making past is because I recently stumbled upon a link to some guy's collection of worst album covers (warning: they're hilarious at first, but then they get creepy and eventually disturbing). I was talking with my brother about these horrific things today when he mentioned how some of Squaz's album covers could qualify as "worst." At first I was indignant, but now that I look at my album covers more, I'm beginning to think he was right (not Squazimoto or Killing Killer Whales, though--those covers rock!)