noble creature
09 January 2009
With accessibility of inexpensive/digital recording equipment and home (or even laptop) studios, the rise of iTunes and the fall of major labels, indie bands have saturated the market in the past few years. I think, like in the design world, there are those bands who fight to keep atop the latest trend and may have a several thousand hits of their myspace page (or blog) for a few weeks, but die out quickly because they lack real substance. And then there are some real gems that cause me to praise the restructuring of the music business. Andrew Bird, for me, is one of those artists. He’s “Indie” in the sense that he’s on an indie label—Fat Possum—he records from a barn filled with egg-laying chickens in Illinois, and is generally difficult to classify into a specific genre, but I don’t think he’s the typical, trendy 2008–2009 indie group: there are no neon colors on his albums, few digital dance beats, and, although his jeans appear to be fairly fitted, I don’t know that I would go so far as to call them “skinny jeans.”
At any rate, he’s got an new album coming out in a couple weeks that NPR is previewing right now that is really, really good. I listened to it about three straight times yesterday and know that I’ve barely scratched the surface. Andrew Bird is a true musician and a gifted song-writer. He may not always be on top of my play list, but for the past 3 years or so—starting with a album redesign I did in school—he has been constantly in my play list.
Here’s a shot of the album cover (and inside flap):
This was for a letterpress class and I had a lot of fun doing it. I played a lot with heavy collage (obviously), altered appropriation, and various kinds of half-tone patterns. It may be a little intense and unfocused, but there’s still some things I quite like about it. Everything in the design does have specific relavance to the lyrics of the album, The Mysterious Production of Eggs, and I feel the general tone and method of design and production fits the album—which, by the way, I listened to multiple times a day during the whole course of the project and never grew tired of… great album.
top photo by Cameron Wittig.
