Questions
Why two album covers?
Marrying the Audio with the Visual
First let me answer the question though. Streaming Services (apple music, spotify, youtube music) are fixed releases. I felt that my AI generated artwork would display best on those services. It is a fixed title, those 20 wonderful songs will now be up there, hopefully a long, long time.
I pay a price to make them available on streaming music platforms. But on my website, I can change songs that are tied to a release. Thus, the expanded edition.
AI COVER
So when an assembly of music was reaching “release” stage, I got started on designing a cover. To me, an Anthology represents a tree - where as you grow and learn and improve your skills, at some point you can look back and see the patterns of your older work in your new work (just like in a leaf of a tree) So on a lurch, I asked AI for a picture of the tree of life. I was blown away by the image it generated. Now, I like to think that I have a healthy skeptical mind toward AI, but with a little photoshop work and a few other tweaks, the image on the left completed nicely. So I went to a content distributor (which I will not name) and I set this release to be a few months ago. During that time, this distributor proceeded to have some insane automated (ai?) tests that made me doubt the validity of their service, so I switched back over to my usual distributor, CDBaby.
My good friend David had gotten to work on some initial design ideas for the cover, and he was not necessarily a fan of the AI generated tree. So in a combination of his amazing eye for design, I merged the above design with the AI tree. As we started working out some alternate ideas for this cover, and we were refining those ideas, he reminded me that I always wanted to ask my amazing friend Jennifer Ure for some photos… so one quick message to her and instantly 30 amazing photos of trees taken by Jennifer were in my iPhone. I sent them along to David, and the light blue cover on the right became the new Cover.
Good Situation
So this is a good situation to be in - I have multiple covers, fans of each, and as the go live date approached, I had to go with one or the other. A simple truth emerged, and that was a that a tree is a living thing. The AI generated cover was perfect for a fixed product, whereas a “Living” project, one I can amend at anytime without cost, is probably better suited for the cover from a living tree. So, there it is. Thank you David for your aways awesome gift of your time and talent, and thank you Jennifer for the same.