Cover Art

I've discovered the joy of no-label cover art.

CDBaby distributes CDs one at a time, to order, from the artist to the listener. They seem to be muddling along well enough to provide some evidence that it might be possible to scrape a living in the 'long tail'. The automatic emails are disturbingly wierd, but they delivered the CD, and that's what matters.

I've bought a CD of Joe Powers (harmonica), who played at a festival this summer.

On the front, Joe - who I remember looking like a perfectly normal, perhaps mid-twenties Germanic American in a suit - is represented posing in enough soft focus for a boudoir portrait of a seventy-five-year-old tart, and holding his instrument erect as firearms are held by James Bond. In the background is a woman, wearing not-a-right-lot of red dress, and looking the other way.

Inside, a folded leaflet shows Joe sitting alone in some dark-wood café with a nice cup of tea. In a photo-story lacking only captions, which I suppose the buyer is invited to provide, Red Dress Woman wanders truculently in. She siezes the politely-rising Joe, and wraps herself around him in various poses. Unable to rip his shirt off with her fingers, she tries a stiletto, the sharpest thing to hand, in a process of lateral thinking familiar to all who've tried to get the packaging off a memory card. I might have started that line of attack by removing the stiletto from my foot, first, or at least not approached the buttons from behind; but there you are. She fails, and they're both still more-or-less dressed on the back.

It reminds me of the dream sequence in The Two Towers when Aragorn falls of a cliff, receives a psychic message from his sexpot fairy princess in a blue nightie, wakes up being snogged by his horse, and spends the next scene riding through the hills to the sound of Howard Shore doing Ennio Morricone. Maybe that was what they had in mind.

As for the music, I like the milongas best, but don't listen to me. You can hear samples here and here.