Album Cover Hall of Fame News Update and Link Summary for August 2021

Posted August 1, 2021 by Mike Goldstein, AlbumCoverHallofFame.com

Entering the second full month of Summer, I find myself a bit perplexed as to how I’m supposed to approach living Life each day. While my wife and I have enjoyed getting out a bit more, we’re still very wary about spending time around our fellow human beings – particularly, the ones who are insisting that “everything’s back to normal” and, as such, looking at those of us still wearing masks as people who are holding back progress in some way. Having recently graduated into “senior citizenry”, I’m now free to become the COF (crotchety old fart) that I prefer to be so, you do your thing and I’ll do mine and, as part of what I’m choosing to do, I’m going to continue to search out items of interest to album cover art fans and share them with you all in my monthly news summaries, regardless of your vaccination status.

This month’s edition of the ACHOF News Update and Summary includes a nice crop of album cover artist/art updates and not one but two examples of ACHOF original content, those being the two interviews I’ve posted with two pairs of creative execs working for Sony Music Entertainment – Frank and Dave and Meghan and Annie – who were kind enough to share their takes on how they have gone about producing several award-winning box sets and special-edition packages. You’ll find links to both of those articles in the “Artist News and Interviews” section of this month’s summary.

Album Cover Art and Artist News Summary for the Month of February, 2017

ALBUM COVER HALL OF FAME’S ALBUM COVER NEWS RECAP FOR THE MONTH OF FEBRUary, 2017

by Mike Goldstein, AlbumCoverHallofFame.com

Greetings from Chicagoland. It’s “awards season”, what with the Grammy Awards, BAFTAs, Writer’s Guild and Independent Spirit Awards and, to end the month with a bang,  the Oscars (followed, in a few months, by another flurry including the Billboard, Tony and BET Awards shows). I don’t know about you, but I’m growing a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of these shows and am somewhat confused as regards their relevance beyond the steady stream of production-related income enjoyed by the folks that stage them…Of course, people should be proud of what they do and want to praise the best examples of work within their respective fields of artistic endeavor, but I find it somewhat sad that some of the most-talented people – those working behinds the scenes, with their credits listed well-down from the top (you know, the part that’s sped through at an impossible-to-read pace during on-screen credit rolls) – are only mentioned in passing or, as we saw during the Oscar telecast, relegated to their own sparsely-attended and covered award ceremonies. Trust me, I understand why this is the case. I mean, who wouldn’t rather see a popular musician’s acceptance speech than hear from the recording engineer or the music video director (or the team that created the group’s logo and album cover), so that’s what sponsors and fans expect to see during an award show telecast. I guess that we fans of cover art can only take solace in the fact that you’ll probably see many more people wearing Dark Side of the Moon t-shirts than clothing emblazoned with a photo of Katy Perry thanking her fans, the label, her manager and her accountant for their support…

Interview with Isle of Man PO’s Paul Ford on The Islands and Bridges Stamp Set by Roger Dean

Interview with Paul Ford, Stamps & Coins Coordinator, Isle of Man Post Office (UK) about the Islands & Bridges stamp set by Roger Dean

 

by Mike Goldstein, AlbumCoverHallofFame.com

This past August, I reported on an art show that was taking place on the Isle of Man built around the works of artist Roger Dean.  With a portfolio that includes not only album cover imagery but (both alone and working with his talented brother Martyn) stage designs, architecture, calendars and a wide variety of merchandise, Dean’s fantastic work continues to impress fans with its ability to transport you to places beyond the imagination. He has worked in many different media, creating designs and illustrations for commercial and fine art customers, including several  architectural designs he’s done of dream-like living spaces and furnishings.

In addition to this show – titled Islands & Bridges – that ran through mid-November at the Manx Museum – a National Heritage organization on the U.K.’s Isle of Man – Dean’s works served as the basis for a collection of postage stamps produced by the Isle’s Postal Service, an organization that has gained a world-wide following of collectors who have been impressed with their previous series of collectibles, including specially-commissioned stamps featuring quintessential U.K. and Isle of Man subjects such as the works of the Aardman animation studio (Morph, Wallace & Gromit and Shaun The Sheep), artist Matt Sewell’s illustrations of birds and, of course, the Isle of Man TT motorcycle races.