What are some of your favorite album covers?
There’s no objective way to judge this, because your experiences and associations are unique, and so whatever resonates with you rightly does. So no matter what anybody else thinks, your answers are correct.
Here are a few of my own favorites. Did I forget some? Oh, surely. Will my answers be the most critically acclaimed? Pffft, nope. Will they resonate with you, too? Beats me! But here they are anyway…..
Blondie, Autoamerican (1980)
The first album I ever bought, at age 11. Still really love the cover (and the album!) — although to be fair, 1978’s Parallel Lines cover (and the album!) was pretty darn good, too.
Toto, Turn Back (1981)
One I really like for some reason from the many, many ‘Best Covers’ lists out there. This album didn’t do so well commercially, nothing like 1982’s multi-titanium Toto IV with “Africa” and “Rosanna” — and I honestly can’t say I’ve knowingly heard a single song from it — but let me say anyway that this is a good cover, peeps. The simplicity, for someone like me with a limited attention span, is refreshing:
Prodigy, The Fat of the Land (1997)
It would be one thing if it were just a Halloween moon crab. But this one is rushing at us at warp speed, big claw brandished, ready once and for all to renounce the sea and claim the fat of the land! Come on, that is just fun...
Derek & The Dominos, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs (1970)
Can’t forget this one. It pushes a lot of buttons in the back of the brain somewhere, to the point where it’s hard to stop looking at it. Lots of clever devices here, like the mouth being way off-center, no nose, severe downward slant of the eye, shade gradient in the hair, mostly ice-cold hues except lips and squiggly brick-wall pattern, which echoes “S” shapes everywhere, not to mention the poofy bouquet of cotton-candy flowers mysteriously floating prominently out front to obscure half the face. Should I be scared of her or enchanted?
But if I must pick, my own favorite of all time is this one.
Victoria Williams, Loose (1994)
We go to great lengths to plan out elaborate visions of success and happiness for ourselves, but after we’ve selected the perfect vacation and the perfect hike and purchased all the perfect gear and planned the perfect route, the most deeply affecting part of it all, the part that stays with us the longest, honestly turns out to be something much, much simpler: The smell of the fresh pine needles on the forest floor.
Being a living creature on Earth isn’t easy at all. None of us asked to do this. Without exception, it comes with a lot of pain and fear and struggle. But when it’s all said and done, all of us who lived on Earth, over billions of years, will share something rare and profound. We’ll have known what it was actually like to be here, to feel and smell the wind or the water in our face, and to appreciate that.
So, how about you?