Answers To Questions No-one Was Asking Dept. - Edit

Many seniors while away their declining years with jigsaws or puzzle books. Some stumble around the garden with secateurs, or take up scrapbooking. Still others dismember their victims in the basement, or expose themselves at kindergartens. It takes all types. Me, I like to cosplay a hotshot Art Director, working on dream accounts without any interference from clients, who are fucking nuisances.

Back in the day, I worked on the My Little Pony™ account, among other Big Brand Bullshittery. I sucked it up. The pay was good, but not enough to quell a wave of self-loathing. I assumed - mistakenly, as it turned out - that Brand Managers, in their black, shrivelled hearts, shared my cynical belief that the best that could be said of our efforts was that it would all be soon forgotten, and did little actual harm. And the pay was shamefully copious, for the amount of "work" we actually did in the studio, funding Hugo Boss suits and a Peugeot GTI 1.9. But I made nothing I was proud of, nothing I'd ever want to put in a frame.

Which is why I like to make pretend album covers. I miss the studio humor (I remember all of that, including the My Little Pony™ Glue Factory presentation), and I miss having somebody else do the actual work, but no Brand Manger is a blessed relief. And no client meetings. No 1.9 frothing over in traffic on the way to client meetings. No pay, either. But it's worth it.

Here's some Covers What Never Was what I done for SLN's superb Beach Boys' Albums What Never Was. You want the albums, head over there and wrestle with his weapons-grade download protocols - you'll never be irritated by a Stealth Link© again!

Sleeve Notes
Add Some Music uses a b&w outtake from the Sunflower shoot, laboriously hand-tinted with a vintage feel. We have to wait until the horse turns around to get Mike Love in the picture (LOL). SLN's meisterwerk Hubba Hubba uses a great image I used already for my Grammy award-winning Dennis comp, so I found this alternative. In my own fevered mind, this is how I should look. SLN loathes Adult Child. Harsh. My Land Locked uses the same basic layout of the "original" cover slick, coupled brilliantly with an image echoing the lyric insert of Surf's Up. See what I did there? Reverberation puts a twist into a familiar shot. No Photoshop involved anywhere.

EDIT: I'm going to add further Beach Boys Recovery projects to this piece, rather than give them another post and waste shrinking internet real estate. So if you're interested, check back from time to time. Here's today's project, Today! (LOL). The album was recorded early '65, when Pop and Op Art was bursting retinas everywhere but Capitol's Art Department, apparently. This design, using (treated) authentic '65 fabric design and authentic fab font, might have presented them as really contemporary, as the Rubber Soul cover did for The Beetles. Note vibrant colors. Note mugshot symmetry - Al, Carl, lean in. Bri, Mike tilt out. Dennis front n' center. Note subliminal hint of psychedelics, dynamic yet balanced proportions inspired by Golden Mean. Note song titles relegated to back cover.