The artwork

A lot goes in to releasing an album, and I tend to take a strange path through all the steps. For example, I've always preferred to get cover artwork in place early on. If you take a few minutes to browse Bandcamp, you'll see that there is a ton of independent music being released every day. I'm convinced that interesting cover art is critical to standing out from the crowd and getting attention from new listeners that don't already follow your work.

For my first two releases, I worked with graphic designer Wayne Pashley who had a company at the time called The Little Inkwell. I approached him with an idea for the first EP and was thrilled with the final product. For the second release "What Do You See When You Dream?", I initially worked with a freelance artist to develop an idea but I didn't completely love it. I was able to track Wayne down again and he came up with an idea that I though was a great fit for that collection of songs.

The concept for this new EP came to me a couple of years ago, and I used some generative AI art tools to create a concept that I could hand off to a graphic designer as a starting point. Since the title is "Slow Release" I thought about using an image of a pill capsule that was bursting open. A mix of dark background and bright 80s colors would hint at the synthwave elements of the music. I've already received some cover art options from freelance artists to consider. I'm not sure that either of them will be the final selection, but they are both really intersting (and very different). I'll probably get one or two more mockups from other artists before making a decision and I'm excited to see what they come up with.