I got a call at two in the morning from the singer from Buddah Woulda Shoulda asking me if I’d be interested in designing the cover for their new album.

They had just come back from a two month recording session in some Himalayan village and were halfway through mixing the album.
“Would you like to be part of the trip man?” I think was how James said it in beautiful spinal tap fashion.

What I wanted was to be back in my dream and I said I’d call him later that day to arrange a meeting.
Mumbling to myself about inconsiderate rock stars, I tossed and turned myself back into sleep but the dream I was chasing evaded me.

From the meeting I had with the band later on that day, I gathered enough information to see some direction of where I could head with the design.
They had told me that they wanted something confusingly simple, much like enlightenment.

I spent the next two days working on a design I thought was IT only to realise that I must have been out of the room when I was doing all the stuffing around making IT.
IT was terrible and I was bouncing off the walls counting the hours until the deadline for the design arrived and I had nothing of worth to give them.

As so often happens, when I admitted I didn’t know what to do, I found out what to do.
I had made a big mistake by placing an expectation on something I hadn’t created yet and had boxed my imagination in.

I had pictured this amazing collage of images as the cover I wanted to make, but ended up with a simple cover to the very simple question the band posed – Do You Mind.

When I met with the band to show them the design, I watched them go into a mumbling huddle to discuss what they had just seen.

I over stirred my cup of tea into a small whirlpool as I nervously awaited their rejection.
I could tell they didn’t like it and would probably go find another designer to do their album cover, so I began to gather my stuff to go and find a nice, big glass of self pity to drink myself into, or three.

Unbeknownst to me, the band had agreed earlier on, that if none of them liked the cover than they’d take it.
Huh?

They explained to  me there reasoning in cosmic terms I didn’t understand but I trusted they did.                                                                                                                                                                                                                It all had to do with the fact that reality was different for everyone, as was enlightenment.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 So the fact that none of them liked the design meant it was the right one.
Huh?

Anyway they were happy, my bank account was happy and I was left confused.

Tags: Album Cover Designer, Album/Record Cover Design

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