Issue #6

Album artwork as a shelter, a journey, and a world of its own

One way architecture and music overlap is through cover artwork. There are some albums that immediately spring to mind like Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or Pink Floyd’s Animals. When a band uses architecture on their album cover, what kind of effect does that have on the overall LP? For me, architecture can conjure ideas of community, family, and urbanism depending on the type of building.

Architecture at its most basic form is shelter. Music is harder to pin down. Some argue music is rhythm or melody, but I think music is shelter too. Why does one sing? Why does music exist at all? These are questions many artists and historians have already explored. As a songwriter and musician myself, music feels like home. No matter where I am in the world, writing and listening to music always comfort me like a shelter in a storm.

Songwriting is a form of world building, and I see music as a form of time travel. Music has this ineffable, transporting effect, that takes the listener on a journey. The journey could be to your local dive bar or to another planet. Either way, after 2-6 minutes, you land somewhere else. A collection of songs, or a record, can be a whole universe or a neighborhood. The scale is up to the songwriter.

The artwork on a record is a representation of that world the songwriter built, but the artwork can expand upon it too. If you’ve ever studied art history (guilty) you might enjoy the next section. I dig into some album artwork analysis: the imagery, the history, and the context.

What records shelter or transport you?

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Shortly after starting this newsletter, I began making a list of all the album covers featuring architecture. I enlisted the help of a few friends and came up with the non-exhaustive list below. I will highlight some albums and their artworks here and in the playlist at the end of the newsletter.

American Football American Football

Animals Pink Floyd

Breakfast in America Supertramp

This record cover art features an abstracted American cityscape with familiar forms. Buildings take the shape of condiment bottles, egg cartons, and salt and pepper shakers. The cover art transforms a cold skyline into a picture of an American diner taken from the POV of you in a “jumbo across the water”. The songs within transport the listener across the pond to a new life where California girls really do exist.

The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan Bob Dylan

Hex Sign Bri Barte

I have never written about my own cover art publicly, so I have to at least once, right? This record depicts a barn in rural Pennsylvania decorated with hex signs, a type of folk art created by the Pennsylvania Dutch settlers. The hex signs on this barn were painted by my great aunt Alice, an artist who specialized in the Pennsylvania Dutch painting style. Hex signs are eclectic and fit the varied nature of my record. Hex signs feature a variety of symbols, themes, colors, and imagery that is analogous to music. While the music on the record isn’t set in rural PA, I imagined a world where decorated barns and nature exist amongst ambiguity and chaos.

Hot Fuss The Killers

London Town Wings

Ok Computer Radiohead

The 1997 album cover depicts an abstracted urban landscape with added collage elements. The Interstate Highway System, a product of modernization following the industrial revolution, ushered a technological revolution with the invention of the automobile in 1888. Ok Computer is a commentary on and product of industrial and technological capitalism. And I’m grateful for it! Now go mope in your closest city and loathe technology while being tethered to it.

Paul’s Boutique Beastie Boys

Physical Graffiti Led Zepplin

This cover shows the partial five-story facades of 96 and 98 St. Mark's Place in New York's East Village. It’s fitting to show twin tenement houses on a double album. You could interpret each song as an apartment, or a window on the facade. Windows are framing devices in architecture and are symbols in music and literature. Here, a once transparent window is obscured with a white sheet (on an alternate cover the cut out windows depict work from well known visual artists). The cover is an edited photograph (in which floors of the featured buildings were removed), designed by Greenwich Village based designer Peter Corriston.

Plumb Field Music

Real Estate Real Estate

The artwork for this record was so striking to me when I first saw it in the early 2010s, but I only just now learned its history when researching for this week’s newsletter. The cover is a cropped image of Italian architect Paolo Soleri's model for his ‘Hexahedron City’. The original image is strikingly similar, it seems Real Estate just slapped a filter on it and called it a day!

Paolo Soleri's original image featuring a model for his ‘Hexahedron City’ (1969)

Sleep Well Beast The National

Sun Structures Temples

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars David Bowie

What a Devastating Turn of Events Rachel Chinouriri

This record features a London housing type called the council house (please correct me if this is wrong), the American equivalent would be what we call public housing. The image depicts the façade of two-story council housing unit occupied by 5 versions of Rachel Chinouriri. The façade is decorated with Union Jack and St. George’s Cross flags, a couch on the front lawn, and a mini trampoline. These conjoined slice-of-life scenes align with the versions of Rachel in the songwriting on the record. Here, residential architecture conjures memories of home, coming of age, and hardship.

What Burns Never Returns Don Caballero

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot Wilco

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Did I miss any?

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Without further ado, here’s this week’s playlist. It’s not my best, but the important part is the artwork. Take a look/listen:

This week I send a special thank you to my friends on Tiktok who helped me come up with this list!