Originally thought of an exercise in personal nostalgia, pretentious, self-serving narcissism and, ultimately, futility, I reconsidered when I realized that many (of you, dear reader) who know me and my artwork/photography (or perhaps no nothing like that about me) might be interested in seeing what very few people have seen. While While I'm certain that nobody but me has heard/endured my entire back catalogue, I'm also pretty sure I can count on one hand those who have seen all of the accompanying "artwork." I've shared my very late albums with friends over the years while hiding the older more embarrassing ones from most everyone else (unless they were involved with it, of course). In many cases, though, the artwork was slightly less embarrassing than the music that went with it, and in some cases quite good, that I thought perhaps a few of you (okay, maybe just one) would be ticked to look at these and not roll your eyes too far back upon reading my accompanying comments. Essentially I was hoping enough of you were curious enough to know what I had done, or if you had been following what I've done, what I've been up to since to warrant this effort. (Sadly, since 2008, not much has happened, at least musically. I've a few recordings that would go towards a new album: a live piece and an electo-acoustic one - both 10 minutes long - and a few piano-pieces-which-may-become-songs, two movements of a planned three-movement piano piece - unperformed - as well as several other never-performed pieces, the most substantial being my doctoral essay orchestral piece, not likely to be recorded any time soon, or ever. Thus, this is the longest musical hiatus I've had in terms of writing, playing and recording music since I began. Tragic, I know.
Between the years of 1985 and 2008 I created 101 album covers. Actually, make that 99, since a friend of mine, Alec Pettifer, with whom I collaborated on a few, did deign to design two of my covers without my assistance. In addition, there were three other images using the Omega (Ω) logo which I never used as covers. Many of these I created in batches before the music was written or recorded, and so oftentimes had little or nothing visually to do with the music. So this is not a ranking of my best albums; I am looking at only the front cover art. (Once again, several late albums featured unique back cover art and disc label art, and none of these are being considered in the ranking, regardless how good they are.)
Obviously most of my covers (76!) did not make the cut here, so what were my standards? Who cares! I'm voting for my own favorite cover art here! I notice I did tend to favor the more recent ones, I tried to include examples from other periods of my output as well. Sometimes there were better ideas than represented here, but fell flat in terms of execution. Some were well-done but uninteresting. And so, for what it is worth, are the top 25. But first, an honorable mention! Because I was going cross-eyed with the Roman Numerals in my album titles, I mistakenly chose this one as #22 (when I did not), but upon seeing it I did not bat an eye, which means it COULD have been in 22nd place. I think it made the top 30-or-so before I weeded them out. Probably several other covers could have been contenders or better for this spot.
And so, without further comment on it, is my HONORABLE MENTION:
THE LIST OF MY TOP 25 ALBUM COVERS:
No comments:
Post a Comment