2024-01-14 04:11:00
For the cover of a very intense fourth album, between folk and pop with a dark and lyrical atmosphere, the Englishwoman Marika Hackman commissioned an artist discovered on Instagram. She recounts their collaboration.
The drawing
“An Irish artist named Brian McHenry did this pencil drawing especially for the cover. I saw his drawings on Instagram and decided to contact him. We discussed the themes of my songs as well as the vast natural expanses he represents with a cinematic dimension to his work that I love. I sent him the music first, so he could understand the world I’m trying to create. The only thing I told him was that I wanted a design that conveyed a feeling of vulnerability and that evoked certain aspects of our modern industrial life that we often talked about together. I wanted something simple, but impressive.”
The desert landscape
“We had many discussions. He sent me lots of different drawings so I could choose the aspects I liked the most and then he would combine them or make more drawings in a similar vein. Some were used to illustrate the singles taken from the album. In my opinion, this drawing perfectly illustrates the melancholy and the feeling of solitude which runs through my record. And then I like its simplicity. It was important that the image was striking, but not too elaborate, that it seemed natural and not the product of intense thought.”
The abandoned shopping cart
“This image is the story of something insignificant and ugly that becomes a center of interest and transforms into something beautiful in its own way. This gives a feeling of insignificance, but also of heaviness of being. It is an image full of contrasts to represent the themes, also contrasting, of this album. A cover is successful when it captures the very essence of a record. This is what Brian McHenry achieved for my album. As for me, the one that impressed me the most recently was Cocoa Sugar from Young Fathers.”
Marika Hackman Big Sigh Chrysalis Records
#Transmitting #feeling #vulnerability #Libération