Half A Year (Album Cover)

www.myspace.com/halfayear

First of all, I have a new song on myspace called "Carry On". I wrote this tune ages ago and never recorded it properly till now. I will make a little video clip for it shortly. But in the meantime let's talk about album cover art.

The point was to get the concept right. We wanted to achieve an album cover that could easily describe an artis

tic idea whilst not being too visually complicated and I think we did quite well for a first try. After a thorough brainstorming session on a piece of white paper with the help of the photographer Philippe Arnoux (www.philippearnoux.com) who I know "reasonably" well, we managed to move forward with a vision.

Album covers are extremely important. They make your CD stand out of the crowd and they give the customer a first impression of what your music is all about. You shouldn't judge an album by it's cover, but most of the time we do. With the digital market, cover art is now reduced to a very small format. On iTunes or Amazon music store main front pages for example the spaces for cover art is miniscule. Details are practically all lost leaving only the main features like color and structure to stand out.

There are many great conceptual album covers that have become iconic in the musical world. My personal top three must be ones by Nirvana for it's iconic concept, Keb Mo' for the shear simplicity and The Smashing Pumpkins for it's artistic value.

But let's not forget all the forgotten album covers which just make you cringe when you look at them. My top three worst album covers must be ones from Abba, The Village People and The Singing Postman (what was EMI thinking?).