It’s Album Covers I Love time!
It looks so New York, but Dylan still looks fresh out of the midwest, a quality he would lose pretty quick. The city stretches off into nothing the way New York does, and the girl is clinging tightly to Dylan’s arm and smiling delightedly at the camera, like nothing in the world could be any better than kicking it with Bob right at that moment.
It’s Album Covers I Love time!
They’re just some indie chicks from outta the Pacific Northwest, but this cover makes them look like gigantic rock stars; the ’90s female version of the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night. This photograph turns Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss into the baddest motherfuckers in the world, if only for just that one moment.
It’s Album Covers I Love time!
It’s the most unromantic picture of suburbia. Notice the bike and the cooler left in the front yard and the ordinariness of the cars, particularly the way two are parked on the lawn rather than in the driveway. This isn’t Hollywood suburbia where the manicured setting is supposed to hide high drama. The life is apparent on the surface in this picture. And yet there is drama here, in the warm glow of the porch light and the twilight blue hue; in the wisps of fog and the thick foliage framing the photograph.
It’s Album Covers I Love time!
The shuttered-up amusement park is a good fit for the album’s recurring moments of melancholic Americana, and the vibrant hues and bold overlaid palette represent visually the bright power chords driving the album. It’s starnge; actually being at that amusement park would probably only be dull, but the image stirs up nostalgia for a long-gone American past that, certainly for me, never existed. That memory plays such an important role on the record makes this a particularly evocative cover image.
It’s Album Covers I Love time!: Girls Crying edition Pt. 1 Well it’s so adorable, isn’t it? It’s so college-y and indie and everything the Postal Service’s target audience is, and I guess that means it’s so me (though this scene is neat by my standards). I like, as you could perhaps tell from this series, album covers that tell a story, and this has so much detail from which to construct a narrative. Our Heroine has taken off her glasses for a good sob — see the balled up Kleenex around the place — and she can’t even fall asleep on her bed with her stuffed animals, because that’s where the letters that have presumably made her so miserable are. Has she been out? There are some high heels off to the side there, as if she’d kicked them off when she returned home, too weary and heartbroken to put them away. She’ll wake up later on and climb into bed for some proper rest. I hope she feels better in the morning. I rate this nine out of ten Zach Braffs.
It’s Album Covers I Love time!: Girls Crying edition pt. 2 Yuki Chikudate sure is pretty, even (especially?) when she’s upset. Even with her toy record player to cheer her up, those Polaroids have ruined her evening. She looks kind of peaceful at this moment; has she fallen asleep like the Postal Service girl, or does she just have her eyes closed in between sobbing sessions? Either way, I still feel like carefully taking that tissue out of her hand, giving her a hug and telling her it’ll all be OK.
Fig 1. Future entries in my Album Covers I Love series. (Also, note that Ghost’s Emerald City features not only London’s Gherkin and Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers, it also has a building once proposed for the World Trade Center site. This City of Wu is a marvellous metropolis indeed.)
Follow the brilliant career of Jonathan Bradley, noted iconoclast, libertine, and man of letters. When he's not blogging here, he blogs at The United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia. Jonathan is the editor of American Review magazine's daily Blog Book section and a daily editor at the Singles Jukebox.
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