When you’ve been continuously plugging away at something like an album (my best guess is that I’ve been working on this for about six months) having everything finished feels incredibly strange. On one hand, this is probably the longest amount of time that I’ve ever spent on one individual project, and it’s an absolute relief and a joy to have it all come together. But on the other hand, I feel like I probably could have worked on this album forever. I’m worrying about little blemishes that I might have missed, about if I made the right artistic choices, and importantly, about what you’re going to think of it. After all, I didn’t make this album to try and storm my way into the charts and become a mainstream musician, I made it because you asked me to. So your opinion, really, is the thing that matters the most.
However, obviously I couldn’t slave away forever trying to make it as perfect as possible, or else the damn thing would never be released. It’s all done now, the songs and the artwork have been sent to my friend Alan at DFTBA Records to be printed, packaged, and plopped onto the servers of all of the digital download services. Essentially, this album no longer belongs to me -- whatever happens now is completely out of my control, and I’m fine with that. It’s still yet to be released, it’s only available for pre-order for the moment, so while you’re waiting for December 1st (release date!) to roll around, I thought I’d chat a bit about the album artwork.
This is the thing that’s most fresh in my mind at the moment, as I actually only finished it over the last couple of days. I basically wanted to design the whole CD like I’d completed a “My First Album!” kit, a pack that you could buy in a shop and fill in yourself. Given that this is my first album, and that it many ways I still don’t really feel like a ‘proper’ musician, I wanted to make something that captured that naïve feeling. I designed the kit myself, printed it out, filled it in, and then scanned the whole thing back into my computer. I also did the same thing with the 8-page booklet which comes with the physical CD, in which instead of just writing down the song lyrics, I talked a little about all of the individual tracks on the album. I’ll leave that booklet as a surprise to those who get the CD, but the front and back of the album look like this:
I spent quite a while trying to figure out what I was going to put on the front in the “insert album artwork here” section. To start with I was going to flick through some old baby pictures and use one of those, to try again to capture that naïve feeling, but the more I thought about it, the more that just seemed a bit too obvious. I even played with the idea of doing a young me/now me style picture (inspired by Ze Frank), but that didn’t really work either. Then I finally realised that, if I had just bought a ‘first album’ style kit, I’d probably just have to take a picture on my phone, of myself, by myself. The picture that I chose was my second attempt. My some miraculous intervention by the gods of photo-framing, the picture came out just right, with a neat reflection of me taking the photo in the background to make it obvious that I was doing it myself, and an expression that summed up my nervousness about releasing the album. I’m really happy with it.
The album comes out on December 1st, and is available on it’s own as well as part of two bundles: The World Is Mine bundle, because I’ve “twinned” my album with my friend Alex Day, and the Cloning Charlie T-shirt bundle, because as well as lots of requests to make an album, I also got quite a few messages from people asking me to make a Cloning Charlie T-Shirt. Hopefully your needs have been fulfilled! Also, I should mention that if you pre-order then you’ll definitely get everything in time for Christmas, that DFTBA will ship to anywhere in the world, and that both of the bundles will vanish once the CD is out. If you do decide to buy any of this stuff then I really hope you’ll like it, and I look forward to hearing what you all think on December 1st :)
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