Whoa, a little Descendents action in the title there!

One of the best things about making music is that it comes with pictures, and you get to choose what picture comes with your music. Not even the death of physical product has spoiled the symbiotic relationship between music and album cover. Awesome for me; album art is the place where my two passions intersect.

As much as I love designing for print and dimensional objects, I have to admit that the digital album cover presents specific challenges which are very satisfying to meet. In digital, you only get one small image to make your impression – there’s no inner sleeve, no booklet, not even a back cover. You’ve got to be perfectly on point. Clear, vivid imagery; metaphors have to be extra clever because they have to be extra simple.

In digital, as in print, color choices need to be just right. The color of album art can have an almost synaesthetic effect, causing the listener to associate that color with the music, and that absolutely does affect the listening experience. I still “hear” Faith No More’s Angel Dust as blue, and their King For A Day as red… prescient choices on the designer’s part, or simply my reaction to the packaging?

I love doing referential stuff, period stuff. With our “classic American music in classic American studios” approach, Sevendys has given me a chance to have fun with classic American musical design. Since each song is being treated as a single, I’ve had to make a corresponding “cover” for every one and I’m having a LOT of fun so far.

Here are some notes on the concepts and techniques behind these designs. Maybe one day I’ll do a cover-by-cover retrospective post on every item in my back catalog (assuming you missed the Art of Eschatone Records exhibition in Brooklyn a couple years ago), but for brevity(and sanity)’s sake I’ll keep this to the first four Sevendys illustrations.

“City Of My Dreams”
My friend and frequent collaborator Michael Doret recently designed an awesome typeface called Steinweiss Script. It’s based on the “Steinweiss scrawl”, the calligraphy developed in the 1940s by Alex Steinweiss, the Columbia Records art director who invented the album cover. Since this would be the first piece of Sevendys art, I figured why not take it from the top and do a tribute to Steinweiss?

“I Hate Love”
This song is technically the “double A-side” of “City Of My Dreams”, so I wanted to play in roughly the same era design-wise. In both pieces, the color palette is limited and all the elements are built out of repeated simple geometric shapes – “City Of My Dreams” is just a series of rectangles, and everything on the “I Hate Love” cover is made of circles. For a vintage look, I messed with both illustrations to make them look like they’d been printed slightly out of register.

Also, honestly… I can’t believe no one thought of the heart-shaped mushroom cloud before me. I’m still waiting for somebody to come forward and ruin my moment.

One welcome side-effect of starting so simple was that it helped me work my drafting chops back into shape. During my decade-plus of art direction, I hadn’t spent much time in the trenches doing any actual illustrating – conceptualizing and compositing are not the same thing as getting in there with your hands and scribbling. I’m still warming up, but after the first two covers I began to feel confident enough to forge ahead with the next round of Sevendys artwork – two pieces I might have otherwise farmed out.

“So So Close”
When I was in college, I was way into the work of Victor Moscoso. I loved psychedelic art in general, but to me, Moscoso’s stuff had something extra. Maybe it was his “vibrating color” – the way he would put opposing colors right next to each other with no borders – or his truly creative sense of layout. If you look back at old Skyscape flyers and demo covers, that’s me biting Moscoso’s rhymes hard. Not that I could even come close; his concepts are super high, and his techniques are his alone.

I had the chance to work with Moscoso on packaging for The Cutting Room Floor, and it was such a thrill for me. He still has it, and he doesn’t use computers to get it (though I learned that he does make pretty heavy use of Xerox machines). Moscoso was able to superimpose multiple images in a way that created a compelling illusion (look at the cover through a pair of old red-and-blue 3-D glasses, one eye at a time, to see what I mean) while still being beautiful at a glance.

The “So So Close” cover design is a tribute to Moscoso: the simple negative-space illusion created by lettering, the vibrating placement of borderless green and blue on a red background. By the way, you haven’t missed this track – the song’s not mixed yet. March, if not sooner!

“When I Step Off The Train”
This one’s a nod to all of the Big Five San Francisco poster artists – it’s got a little something from each one. The colors are the same as “So So Close” (plus black and the white of the paper) because the two pieces will be screenprinted onto one jacket when both songs are released on 7-inch. The vibrating color is your Moscoso connection; the deconstructed-train columns on the sides are, to me, reminiscent of the techno-psychedelia Stanley Mouse was doing well into the Eighties; the use of the Art Nouveau block lettering is a Wes Wilson thing; the Mucha-like columnar composition, including the Nouveau ornaments in the upper corners and outline of the hippie girl’s hair, is something all of the Five used, but none so faithfully as Alton Kelley.

Both this and “So So Close” were sketched on paper, then scanned and completed in Illustrator. Knowing that they’d eventually be printed, I felt comfortable giving both designs a bit more detail. Oh! The diamond checkerboard area at the bottom is not wasted space – it’s a spot for the band to sign and number when the singles are pressed. Just sayin.

By the way, here is an almost-finished mix of “When I Step Off The Train”, just in. The single won’t be out for a while, and the mix still needs one or two more tweaks, but why not stream it anyway?

Sevendys | “When I Step Off The Train” | in-progress mix
Jed Davis: keyboards, vocals
Avi Buffalo: guitars
Sheridan Riley: drums, tambourine
Chuck Rainey: bass
Recorded at SugarHill, Houston, TX
Mixed by Eric Jarvis

My pal Matt Biscuiti likes to ask my opinion on the future of magazines. I’m not sure if this is because he actually wants to know it, or if he just likes to watch me rage.

I worked in the magazine business for 15 years. I am one of a lucky few people who still do, though it is no longer my main source of income. I love print magazines – the way they are made, the way they present information, the thought and imagination that goes into everything from the images to the text to the layout to the paper stock to how they’re bound. But the Internet has destroyed print, mostly because a bunch of Baby Boomer assholes got greedy and interacted unwisely with a technology they didn’t understand.

Which, come to think of it, is the same reason the Internet was able to destroy the music business.

I don’t think either industry is coming back – at least, not any way like it was. And I could go on at length about both, but I gotta go have dinner with my friend Al, so I’ll leave that for some other post. I do want to share a question that Matt just e-mailed me, along with my answer.

First, though, I ask you to keep in mind that what makes magazines and newspapers money is ads, not sales of the actual printed product. Craigslist has virtually eliminated classified ad revenue, and no matter what that’s not coming back. So the question for periodicals is how to maximize the remaining potential ad dollars – not necessarily how to get people to purchase their magazine or newspaper. If you can tell advertisers that 100,000 people will see their ad, then the advertisers will buy, and your periodical will stay afloat whether most of those readers pay the cover price or not. That’s long been the idea behind cheap and free subscriptions.

The Web has killed print because these dipshits who put all of their content online for free didn’t realize that the ad paradigm is different on a computer screen. People can block ads and scroll past them; we’re trained to ignore banner ads. Ads generate a much smaller response on the Web than on the printed page, and thus are worth a lot less – so much less that you can’t keep your business open with revenue from online ads. That’s money publishers were counting on when they made their product free on the Internet (information is the product; not the printed piece, which is just the delivery system) and now they can never go back to charging for online content. Oops.

Putting content behind a pay wall is not really about bringing in revenue from readers. It’s about making it less convenient to read on screen, thereby encouraging people to they go back to the print edition, where ads are actually worth something. Print ads are hard to ignore; they’re tangible and they last for as long as that copy of the periodical exists. They have value that the ephemeral Web ads don’t.

Okay, that was two more paragraphs than I intended to write on this subject. Before I bore you with any more of that shit, here’s Matt’s question:

MB: So has the designer in you been inspired by the iPad yet, or do you still think the business model won’t make up for all the $ given away by the free interwebs?

And my response. I welcome comments on this as it’s a debate I’m passionate about. (Wouldn’t be sharing it here otherwise.)

Newspapers and magazines need one of two things to happen:
- Apple adds a section to its iBookstore for periodicals, with a proprietary reader that you can use in iTunes on any computer.
or
- Everyone in the world gets an iPad.

Magazines and newspapers are reading material – the race should be on to work out a standard, but flexible, iPad magazine format which would be available in the iBookstore, along with everything else people buy to read. There would be cross-pollination on a virtual magazine rack, and it would be one less thing for people who want reading material to think about. And back issues would be easy to format and sell, complete with ads (which would help periodicals increase ad rates – “your ad will be in people’s faces for as long as they’re buying our back issues”).

Honestly, all of these magazine apps seem to be overpriced and stupid. A 500MB download for one issue of Wired, at higher than subscription prices?! What the hell is the point of that? Doesn’t matter how good it looks if no one will bother with it.

Jed.

I’ve been secretly bouncing back and forth between Albany and Brooklyn for the past two weeks, making all the arrangements for my move in little teeny tiny trips. On the road to Capitaland at 4am; back in the city for work by 4pm.

I spent a few hours in the new apartment on Thursday, taking measurements so I can figure out where all my stuff will go. Not all the furniture can come with me, as it was purchased to make use of a loft space with a specific architectural feature – namely, no features whatsoever.

Taming that Brooklyn loft was some kinda challenge. Man! The apartment was literally an empty 800-square-foot rectangle with some windows, and the idea of filling it in a practical but appealing way was so intimidating. I kept thinking about something Michael Doret had told me the first time I commissioned a magazine cover illustration from him. I had been explaining this particular mag’s quirks – how there was always a rule line 1/2″ from the outside edge, how nothing was allowed to obscure our logo, how mailing labels would eat up the lower left corner, how there had to be X lines of copy here and here – and I was just cringing at having to place all these restrictions on a great designer. But Michael was cool with it. Working within a set of parameters, he said, was actually preferable to staring at a blank page. It provided a framework upon which to compose his design.

Reeves once told me something similar about doing guitar sessions. He said that when working for hire, one of the first questions he’d ask is what sort of things the client did not want him to play. The resulting restrictions would leave Reeves free to operate within the remaining space, while still enabling him to develop parts in his own style.

I agree with that approach. Whenever I start a project, a band, an album, a song – even a blog post – I like to name it immediately. That name may change, but it provides a basic concept, a direction which enables me to focus. A point.

It’s like having something to say before you sit down to write a song. When you go in with a mission, you write nice and tight. You also waste less time – yours and other people’s.

Anyway… this new apartment is just fuckin full of restrictions. With all these Victorian quirks, it’s the opposite of the Brooklyn space. For example, here’s a floor schematic I did up for the living room:

That is not a plain old rectangle – there’s a fireplace that juts out into the room, interrupting the wall. The entry to the kitchen is six-and-a-half feet of nothing, flanked by columns. And there’s another four-foot gap on the right which leads to an alcove.

A trip to Ikea is still in order, but I’ve figured out how to integrate a bit of the old loft furniture. That’s what those pink shapes are – shelves, armchairs, all that shit. And a Kiss pinball machine. You didn’t think I was gonna put that in storage, did ya?

I believe that if you have a style of your own, you will fill any space, regardless of rules or restrictions, with something that is identifiably you.

This is what it sounds like when you play “Yuppie Exodus From Dumbo” off a wax cylinder.

Jed Davis | “Yuppie Exodus From Dumbo” cylinder recording | April 13, 1910

The cylinder was dubbed by placing a microphone in front of an Edison Fireside phonograph (c.1910) with model N reproducer and cygnet horn.

A limited edition pressing of cylinder records will be out in June, paired with a digital download of both the cylinder version of the song, and a hi-fi stereo mix. The entire run of cylinders will be signed and numbered by yours truly – and by the legendary Michael Doret, who designed the package. Here’s a small detail of Michael’s wraparound illustration:

Congratulations to the great Michael Doret (illustrator of the album cover on the right), whose Canter’s-inspired Deliscript typeface was named one of the year’s 16 best new fonts by the Type Directors Club. Seems like this sort of thing happens to Michael fairly often.

It just so happens that MD and I are working on something pretty cool. Details to come.