I used to love to look at cover art for vinyls.
There's the drums, the music, the melodies, the lyrics, the production, the artwork: there are so many elements to making an album, and the drumming is just a very small fraction of what I focus on.
All the art for Tool is done by the me and the band.
Whether it be tour posters, album packaging, videos, stage design, etc., the visual aspect of music is very important to us.
I had 45 Avril Lavigne posters. Those were my first posters.
Everybody had posters in their room; everybody had the four symbols of Zeppelin on the wall and all that.
The bloody nose was the album cover for my first album, but it's since become my logo.
If you look at an old piece of sheet music, there's all kinds of text on it, there are ads, there are proclamations of the greatest songs' success, there's artwork. So there is a tactile, physical experience of learning the song and the way it's notated.
I kind of rely on my artist friends to make my physical music worth buying by having them all come together and create beautiful artwork that everyone is gonna want to own to support my record.
I was thinking about how a playlist is really so inadequate as opposed to a mixtape because it takes seventeen days to really make a mixtape with a homemade cover that you like and that you'd give away.
There are some bands for whom that works very well and it's no disrespect to them because I'm sure there's something honest and natural about it, but for us I feel like it would be dishonest and kinda disrespectful to that artwork to do that. To be like: "Okay, we're going to go back and only play these songs, even though we have an hour to an hour and a half set and we gotta play more songs, but we'll skimp you on your extra half hour." That's just silly to me.
People don't appreciate music any more. They don't adore it. They don't buy vinyl and just love it. They love their laptops like their best friend, but they don't love a record for its sound quality and its artwork.
I think that, in a digital age, album covers are becoming a lost art.
It has been difficult to hold onto many paintings but I have retained a few. Possibly the current favorite is titled 'Big Band' completed in 2005. It measures 13 feet x 9 feet. It has 18 nearly life size recognizable portraits of the biggest jazz stars that I knew and saw perform in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, '80s and includes Wynton Marsalis.
I am always looking for a cool tee shirt; maybe one with a rock band or an old advertisement.
Some of my favourite record and album covers and stuff have all been the singer, and they create a character, and they dress up a little bit.
