A Collection Of My Favourite Album Covers
I’ve been checking out heaps of blog posts showing great examples of album art. Most notably these articles on Smashing Magazine; 35 Album Covers, 100 Obscure & Remarkable Album Covers, and these articles from Abduzeedo; Part One, Part Two.
Those posts mentioned above really show a great collection of album art. It’s a shame how this art has died away since music has mainly been assessed online. I love going through people’s ‘vinyl’ collection and staring at the album art printed onto a nice big sleeve. Some people say album art is dead, but I still make the album art show up on my computer when I listen to tunes. I even know people who will impulse buy albums just because they like the cover, without even listening to the music! So I still think it’s important to get good album art for your cd. If your album art is average, people will think your music is average and will most likely put your cd back in the rack and move on.
I decided to go through my collection and pick out my favourite album art, just to get some inspiration before I start on my own. Although the collections of album art on smashing magazine and abduzeedo have already done excellent posts on this, it was good to go through my own collection and pick out the album covers that I never seem to get sick of.
The list is in no particular order, in fact I went through my music collection, picked them out then randomized the list!
Album Progress Update + Tasmania Trip
Just got back from a short trip back to Tasmania, where I organised a demo of my upcoming cd with all the tracks in order etc. It was good listening to it on heaps of different systems and getting feedback from people as to how they think it sounded.
The general consensus is that most people are pretty pleased with it, which is a bit of a relief! One of my friends mentioned that I sounded ‘UK like” which I’m happy to take as a compliment! (I’d rather sound UK then Aussie… haha).
But, there is still alot of work to be done. Although all tracks are complete, there still is alot of polishing to do, especially on the second half where some tracks just need to be ‘punched in the face’ so to speak.
Meanwhile, the trip to Tasmania was filled with immense fun – plenty of drinking, gaming, photo snapping and flooding! Yes the cataract gorge in Launceston was flooding through after heaps of rainfall in the last few months – check out the pic below – this is where obviously a playground is (see the top of the swing set), there are also two pools hidden beneath there as well. Pretty cool!
Wordle based on lyrics of my songs
Since wordle seems to be the flavour of the week, I decided to make one based on lyrics from the songs I sing in that should feature on my next cd. The songs being Villains, Mr. Gangster Man, Tomorrow’s Past, Dreaming Again, Black Crow and Blue Scarf.
Pretty interesting to see my most popular words are don’t, even, just, like, please and growing. That’s along with the song titles of course!
Turn Your Last.fm Into A Wordle
So what is Wordle?
Well it’s a cool site developed by Jonathan Feinberg that makes nice images based on text that you input. The way it makes the images is based on how frequent the word is.
So I thought, it’d be cool if it can generate a ‘Wordle’ based on your last.fm, for example artists with more plays would be bigger in the resulting ‘Wordle’ image. But that would involve copying your favourite artists’ name several times and can be a waste of time, so I’ve made it easier for you. Simply enter your last.fm username, choose what charts you want and then click go.
Note: Results will open in a new window, you then must copy the text and paste it into the ‘Wordle create’ textbox.
Warning: Last.fm users with high playcounts on their artists (for example 2000+ on some artists!) may take alot longer to load the results. Be patient!
New: You can now select top track charts!
I’m not the world’s best coder. So if anyone wants to help me make this work better, shoot me up an email!
Here are some examples of last.fm + wordle:
Old Stuff That’s Actually Quite Awesome
So today I was looking for an old piece of music amongst my many unorganised folders of music sessions everywhere. This is when I found quite a dated piece – a song that I wrote when I was mainly just writing instrumentals because I still wasn’t confident enough in my singing. Now the thing is I remember exactly why I gave up on this song – it was random, not complete, all over the place and just didn’t make any sense. However, since I wrote that song my music has in fact being pushed towards matching that exact style (That’s right, I make music that’s not complete, random, all over the place and that doesn’t make sense hehe). I listened through the song today and just couldn’t believe my ears, why did I ever ditch this song?
Its true that its a good idea to leave things and come back to them, hell even leaving a blog post and coming back to it the next day makes you see heaps of errors in your writing. Most of all my songs that I’ve left and come back to have made me face palm when I listen to them again. Except this song. So today I built on it, went crazy, and it was terrific (I bet you tomorrow I wake up, listen to it and think – oh god, why did I blog about this? this is song is horrid).
And you know what? I’m actually going to put it on the album. Yep. There’s been songs that I’ve worked on for about 8 times the amount as this one, but hey, I guess that’s just how the cookie crumbles.
Oh, and to be a jerk, I’m not going to attach the whole song, in fact just attach an excerpt. The song title will be named “Flint’s Adventures In A Rather Dangerous Land”. This is dedicated to my soft toy giraffe friend Flint, who has unfortunately been adopted by me, and has been the only witness to all my rather frustrating, enjoyable and downright crazy bedroom studio sessions. Sometimes I feel that Flint would miss his friends back at the soft toy store. So Flint, this song if for you!
Flint’s Adventures In A Rather Dangerous World
That Damn Last Song
So lately I’ve been trying to organise my songs and work out which order I want them to be on the album. This has become quite a frustrating process. I’ve already got my first track sorted out, which is cool. But finding a track to put on the end of the album is starting to annoy me.
You want the last track on the album to leave the listener on a good note, make them feel like the album is complete. The thing is, I’ve had a shortlist of songs I could put on the end of my album, but when I work on them for too long I decide that the song deserves to be higher up on the list – obviously being the last track the percentage of listeners actually listening to the song would be quite low in comparison to say my first 3-5 songs. Headache!
Anyway, to clear my head I went in search of albums I like that have a great closing track. Here’s my top ten:
Public Enemies
I went and saw this film last night. Things were all going well – it was a rainy evening, I had a sufficient supply of snacks and I was in good company.
The thing about this film is that – well with a cast like Johnny Depp, Christian Bale and Marion Cotillard I think the hype for this film was a little over the top. Especially since every tram, street and cinema pushed the life-size cut out of DEPP in your face. THIS FILM HAS JOHNNY DEPP IN IT, YOU MUST WATCH.
The film was good, not bad, not great. It was entertainment – a popcorn flick. The dialogue was pretty lame in most parts – however for me this was the best bit of the movie. I couldn’t stop laughing everytime Christian Bale pulled out some huge piece of dialogue in his tangy American accent.
The action scenes where meh. All the bank robberies were the same, and there was quite a large scene in the middle of the film; which after 5 mins of crazy angles and guns firing everywhere I found myself thinking about what I was going to get done on the weekend and then realised I was watching a Johnny Depp film. One of my friends asked me ‘Was this movie filmed in digital with a handycam?’.
In general, I’m sick of action films having this kinda rapid camera changing stuff during action. You can’t see shit, have no idea whats going on and end up drinking half your large coke just to handle the nausea. I wonder what the difference of cuts was between say this film and No Country for Old men.
If you’ve got a bowl of popcorn, good company and wanna have a few laughs then go check it out, if you’ve got expectations that this film is going to be film of the year then don’t waste your money.
Have fun
Villains
I’ve added the song ‘Villains’ to the website. Its a few months old now, but the writing process and the lyrics for it took little time in comparison to some of my other songs. The main riff uses guitar and bass, and if you notice the riff continues throughout the whole song, with other elements just getting layered over the top.
The chorus ‘They are growing into villains again’ was inspiration from this kid who was playing music through his mobile way too loud on the train (it was awful music as well). Everyone on the train really wanted to punch him and in the end it was a nice old lady who told him to turn it down. The kid looked so pissed off that he had to turn his music down, was quite funny actually.
Black Moth Super Rainbow
These guys are pretty cool, haven’t heard them before. My girlfriend showed me this film clip and its actually really kinda creepy, but well done all the same. I enjoy their style of music and most of the songs on their cd goes for less then a couple of minutes which is cool – it goes all over the place but the drums are consistent and keeps the groove together.
Highway 61 Revisited
This album has really grown on me during the past few weeks, it’s got to the stage where I almost prefer every song on it over “Like a Rolling Stone” (Madness!).
Still, the thing about this album that really draws me to it is the fact that it just sounds so raw – but in a good way. These days so much music is made to the best standards, using the best gear, and the best sound engineers (not me!). But this album sounds makes you feel like you were standing in the studio listening to them record in one take. In fact that reminds me – I heard during an interview with the Rolling Stones that they could only afford limited hours in the studio – so therefore they just smashed the song over in about an hour and just left it at that and went on with it.
Now days with people recording in their homes, like myself, we have this timeless period where mistakes such as a small lapse in time or an 90 percent guitar riff, starts to haunt you until it gets to the stage where you end up punching a wall cause you realised that the first recording of the guitar riff was better than your 50th.
Well, that’s just a thought or too, Highway 61 Revisited rocks – go listen to it, your father will appreciate you more.