I miss having something to stare at while I listen to music.
I like looking at the art people choose for their albums. I like reading along with the lyrics.
I liked obsessing over the cover of R.E.M.’s Reckoning so much that when I was 16, I wrote to Howard Finster, who painted the serpentine form on the album’s cover. (He also did the cover of Talking Heads’ Little Creatures.) I have no idea what I said to Finster, but he replied with an awfully kind letter. He wrote, “Friends and fans like you give me the courage to keep working.” He said he had a lot of visitors at his home in Georgia and invited me to be one of them sometime. The letter is one of the few pieces of my life’s ephemera I’ve always held onto.
There’s a sweet chain of human connections there. From R.E.M. to me to Howard Finster and back. It all came from staring at Reckoning while I listened to “Camera” over and over again.
It was important to us that every format of New Love Stories include some tangible component. A thing to hold and look at. For the digital version, we thought a nice poster would do the trick. Brent McCormick designed it. Richmond’s Triple Stamp Press silk screened them onto hefty ivory poster stock. It contains all the same info (the lyrics and credits) as the album and CD packaging.
Every purchase of the poster includes a digital download of the album. Pre-order yours here.
I think about this every time I buy a digital album. There’s no denying that the ease of having music on my phone available to listen whenever and wherever is great. But having something physical to hold and interact with that included album art was part of the fun and excitement about buying new music. I am excited about this poster! It feels like a perfect remedy to this loss—album art in a larger format.
That’s a beautiful poster. A wonderful idea. Fuzzy being his cute self.