Album Cover Essay Topics

Album covers represented a unique visual language for representing the tone and personality of the music it was designed to sell .

I think I was twelve, and I remember the first time I held Iron Maiden’s Powerslave album in my hands. The cover of the band’s undead mascot Eddie was painted as an Egyptian statue for this release. The cover represented the tone and feel of the CD’s title track, as well as the rest of the songs. It’s always been known to me that art is an important component to the music that it’s trying to sell, but why does it truly matter, what’s it’s history, and what’s it’s place in music and media today?

In an article called the Album Cover Art Series by Robert Benson, Benson interviews Vinyl preservationist Gary Freiberg. Benson asks Freiberg why the images on an album cover make such an impact. “It’s the most personable art form there is.” Freidberg responded, “We can appreciate the Rembrandt’s and Picasso’s as fine art but we don’t relate to their work personally, we don’t attach our emotion with fine art. Music is the primary vehicle to our memory of good times and good people, Dick Clark called it the soundtrack of our lives. At times cover art is part of that emotional connection

Pepper album that had never been done before, this was the first packaged vinyl to create a feel, it came complete with inserts and a never seen before designed album cover.” Bryan Wawzenek from Ultimate Classic Rock.com writes that “the cover had been conceived by Peter Blake and his wife Jann Haworth.” Paul McCartney had come up with the basic idea, “a presentation featuring a mayor, a corporation, a floral clock and pictures of famous people hanging on a wall behind the Beatles.” The rest of the band also suggested figures like Fred Astaire, and Karl Marx be included on the cover. The Sgt. Pepper sleeve displayed that cover art can have weird designs and make the consumer turn his, or her