I’ve been hunkering down these past few weeks, recording and editing tracks for the new album, and designing some artwork. I thought you might like to have a sneak preview of some of the song covers.
In the days when browsing the racks in a record shop was what everyone did, your interest in an unknown artist would first be piqued, not by sound but by visuals. The image conveyed by a record’s cover was an integral part of its appeal. Perhaps it’s not so important now, but I’ve enjoyed putting together some virtual covers – here they are.
“Dare to Dream” (Heliophyte Song)
This is my favourite cover of those I’ve created. The song it accompanies, “Dare to Dream”, is about what it’s like to hold yourself back for years on end, never quite allowing yourself the joy of living life to the full… and what it might be like to finally let the sunshine into your life. A heliophyte is “a plant thriving in full sunlight”. I’ll post the lyrics up here in another post sometime.
“All I Ever Wanted”
“All I Ever Wanted” is a song about falling in love and forgetting about everything else in your life. There’s a line in it – “I’m never going home / Monstera wilt and droop and die, while I feel so alive.” I wanted to emphasise that contrast (for good or bad) – how love can be so all-consuming that other things get neglected.
When it came to finding visuals for the cover, I’m not proud to say that it was relatively easy to find a browning, crispy houseplant to photograph without going to much special effort. (And I’m not sure I have the excuse of being in the first flush of obsessive love, 20+ years in!) It’s a bromeliad, not a monstera but the latter are actually quite hard to kill.
“The Emptiness”
I’ve written about “The Emptiness” before. I wanted the cover to embody the feeling of emptiness, but I’m not sure I’ve totally pulled this off – it’s one I will reconsider before uploading it to Bandcamp when the time comes. Weirdly the aesthetic (unintentionally) reminds me of a Britpop band like Ocean Colour Scene – not sure what I’m recalling here.
I would also like this cover to be a lot more inviting – as I wanted to lure people in to the idyllic “nowhere place where you are free”.
“Our Time”
This song will also be familiar to regular readers of this blog (if there are any!) “Our Time” is a reflection on the inevitable decay that awaits us all – hopefully the metaphor isn’t too laboured as I am very fond of the song.
It literally was inspired by the annual appearance of new apples on the tree in our garden – the way they fill the air with such a distinctive sweet smell, and how in the space of a few months the odour ferments into vinegar and the wasps settle in for a feast.
So, the visuals for this track are also very literal, and this is a photograph of said apples – probably a generation or two on from the ones I took my inspiration from in the lyrics.
They are Discovery apples if you’re interested – the most gorgeously fresh and fragrant apples I’ve ever tasted.
That’s it for me for now – I’ll be back before too long, I hope, to bring you more from the world of Crushed Cadence.
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