As the great late Thomas Edison once said — "There ain't no design project quite like an album packaging project." Though the floundering music industry is a risky businesses these days, I can never get enough joy out of designing the visual representations of great music. One of the more recent album artwork projects I had the opportunity to work on is Broken Fences' Stormy Clouds EP.
If you haven't heard of the duo, Morgan and Guy have some serious song writing prowess. Wielding a combination of indie rock styling with classical folk sensibility, Broken Fences certainly has one of the more unique sounds in the Pittsburgh music scene. And the song writing is just the tip of the iceberg ... the real magic lies in the harmonies — those wonderfully great harmonies. Their voices work fantastically together. But yet, in my opinion, Broken Fences' songs are best delivered with the full ensemble. And that's exactly what Stormy Clouds delivers. A few extra instruments manned by talented musicians really deliver what I would hope to hear in a great folk tune. But perhaps the best thing about Broken Fences is that they appreciate a good vinyl record, and don't shy away from spending a few bucks to reach greatness.
In fact, Broken Fences have been hiring me for all sorts of design work in 2013. I've done a number of posters including these European Tour posters that were a blast to create. So I certainly had no hesitation in jumping on board with the 10" vinyl EP, that was officially released a week or so ago at the venerable Club Cafe in Pittsburgh's South Side.
The artwork features photography by Joseph Stammerjohn, who also produced the band's new music video for Simplicity (which I've conveniently embedded below.) The cover is hand-colored by me, and the display lettering is hand-brushed, based on a typeface that the band uses in much of their collateral.
The record is definitely worth a listen. Pick up a copy of the record over at Broken Fences' CDBaby page, or if you are a schmuck who prefers digital versions of things, they've got the digital download for sale over there too, or you can grab it at Bandcamp or iTunes.
Excuse the unreasonably over-saturated sub-par iPhone photographs. Im still working on my ability to get rich using a tiny tiny lens.
