finally got it covered

that's a horrible play on words that is meant to tactlessly communicate the fact that i finally picked some "cover" art for the second record. i use the term "cover" loosely simply because i've never going to actually sell a version of the album that will be worth enough to spend the money and other resources necessary to print up cd-jacket type thingies. but it's fun to pick out art and think about album art designs, just like it's fun to do pretty much anything else involving colors and feelings and such things.

the first record's cover was the picture of me in the trash-valley on the west end of spokane, which was appropriate for what i think came to be the main theme of Not California and those songs. disillusionment, or maybe more exactly both thinking that what you have is something more than what you actually have and also missing out on what you have because you want it to be better and can't appreciate it as it is, was the theme of so many of those songs, either purposely or accidentally. actually, there's only one song (maybe two) on that record that aren't about those things. i remember starting the ideas for so many of those songs as being love songs, and instead they ended up being about learning that you can love something all you want but that doesn't change what it is. i guess that writing 12 songs about that sort of says something about me and my craziness. oh well.

standing there in spokane looking disappointed in a pile of dirt and garbage with a semi-fancy but semi-rundown skyline in the background seemed a fitting representation of this feeling: somewhat chagrin, somewhat hope, somewhat disappointment. mostly disappointment. of course, it has since occured to me that perhaps this concept is a little emo. interestingly, the subtext not visible in the picture is that i was on a trip with two of my best friends when the picture was taken and i was actually having a great time. the duality is ironic and omnipresent! goodness!


anyway, i wanted the cover this time to be less me-centric and something more abstract; after all, i'm basically reworking a lot of the songs i recorded last time, with 2 tracks from the third and upcoming record thrown in for fun (only both done different than they will be on LP3). so i started thinking about themes again, and i kept coming back to the word/title that's been floating around in my head for a few months now: "ricochet". it's a word i'd originally envisioned as a title for the third record, but the concept seems now more fitting in the instance of the second record. mostly because i rerecorded these old songs because i haven't been able to settle, in three years, on a specific way i wanted to record them that i'd be happy with. jammy? folky? death-metaly? i've done pretty much all those and none seemed right. then, during the practices for the susan's show this winter, i realized exactly where i wanted to go with them (with no small help from mike and justin), and thence came the morphing of this record idea from a 5 song EP to a 55-minute 8-track jam-monster deserving of its own fucking title and cover. i wanted to use "ricochet", because it's emblematic of why i haven't fucking managed to finish the new (third) record yet; because i haven't had any sort of stability (financial, emotional, social) in a year and a half and i haven't been able to put down enough tracks in one place to make a cohesive album. fuck, even when i DO finally finish the third record, it's going to be split into two halves because i wrote half of it six months ago in ohio and i'm writing the other half right now. so calling this "ricochet" is basically my way of saying "this is the best i could do while holding some semblance of a life together, but i'm proud of it regardless". so how to create a cover that captures that feeling? here's how:


i took this picture the other night, and when i was going through the pictures i'd taken that night, this one in particular caught my eye. it's a picture of the skyline of pullman at night, which i took from a hill on the edge of town. it just seems appropriate because of pullman's sort of centrality in all the different kinds of dislocation and uncertainty and ricocheting that i've done in the last 16 months or so. it's pullman, but it's not pullman, like you can't quite focus enough to make out exactly what it's supposed to mean, and that's sort of what the recording's about also. maybe the transition phase from the disappointment and loss of certainty from the first album to what (will hopefully be) a different, new stage of living in the third one. i don't know what the fuck i'm talking about.

anyway, that's the album art. simple, and fun, and complicated and stupid. i'm going to eat something. fuck.