Zak Claxton: Making the album part 13,262: The Singles

We live in a weird world. We really do.

Example: I perform live music almost exclusively in a virtual 3D Internet world. That's weird. And while back in reality, people buy singles more than ever before (due to the popularity of digital downloads), almost no one bothers creating artwork for their singles anymore, since online stores like iTunes generally allow only the one piece of cover artwork to represent all songs off an album. That's pretty weird too.

There was a time (he said nostalgically) when people would go to record stores and buy little round pieces of black vinyl that had two songs on it, called the "A Side" and "B Side". The "A Side" was usually the hit song off an album, and sometimes the "B Side" was a tune that wasn't even on the album at all... you had to buy the single to hear it. It was cool, if you were a big fan of a band, to go buy the single. And it usually came in a little paper sleeve that had custom artwork on it.

I was pretty sure that I was done with my album artwork after I handed off the files to be printed on my CD packaging. But lo and behold, my immersion in a weird world has come through for me once again. My record label Frothy Music decided to go with a music vendor system in Second Life that allows people to purchase each single in addition to the entire album as they choose. The cool thing about this system is that people can elect to play the music in SL on their parcel by plugging a code into their media stream, and they can also download the song to their computer for uses outside of SL. But the other cool thing? Each single can use its own artwork, giving me an excuse to show you the following covers! Life: it's weird, but mostly cool.

Each single has some meaning to the artwork that's appropriate in some way to the song, but I've never been a big believer in explaining my art to people. So, here they are! Enjoy.

Lines on your Eyes