I’m working right now on the graphic design for the CD, and it’s exciting, challenging, and scary. I’m not a visual person. But although I don’t think in visual images, I do actually care what things look like. There are some things I like and some I don’t like about images and design (I fall for modernist designs in architecture and housewares, for instance), and I definitely have strong feelings about colors (I love colors in the purple family and hate those in the neighborhood of orange). And an album cover is forever, so to me it matters what it looks like. With the first CD, I went out and found, and then secured permission to use, the photo that became the cover. From the beginning when I thought of the title (Crooked Highways), I started doing image searches on the web to see if I could figure out what something with that title would look like. And when I saw the image of a road sign indicating a twisty road (and pointing up, surrounded by an intensely blue sky) I knew what I wanted the album cover to look like. So although I hired someone to work on the design, I pretty much dictated what it would be. That’s not true this time around. In fact, one of the main downsides of choosing the album title that I did (At Home In This Town) was that it was one of the only ones under consideration that I didn’t have a clue how to implement visually. Luckily I don’t have to face this task alone. I hired Adam Sweeney to do the graphic design. Adam is a singer-songwriter too, and he’s actually the reason I ended up recording with Dave Chalfant for the first CD. Adam had sung Dave’s praises and put in a plug for me with him. My music has some similarities to Adam’s – we both write complex, lyric-driven stuff (with bits of religious imagery scattered throughout in sometimes quasi-sacrilegious ways) that suggests to me that he understands what I’m doing musically, and that piece is important to me in a designer. (And he plays banjo on one of the CD tracks too!) Adam’s day job is graphic design, so when we realized that he could squeeze me into his busy schedule I jumped at the chance. Another thing that makes this design process difficult is that I love simple designs; I really didn’t want a CD cover that looks cluttered. But most of the ideas friends and fans had brainstormed with me about how to represent the CD title sounded difficult to implement without making the cover look too busy for my sensibilities. Yeah, it’d be cool to have a scene in the middle of a town square (especially with a busker playing), but that would mean there’d be a lot going on. And my other quirk is that I definitely didn’t want the cover to be a photo of me, and I don’t, in general, like art with people in it. (Yes, I’m sure with some spare time and lots of psychotherapy we could come up with some fascinating insights on that topic . . .) So how do you represent At Home In This Town in an uncluttered, de-populated way? Luckily, Adam is a genius. We had a preliminary conversation about different approaches to take and then he sent me three initial options. And one of them, with some small modifications, looks like it’s what we’re going with. It’s a photo of a little tiny dilapidated homemade birdhouse, balanced on a board, right next to the wooden slats of a house. The birdhouse, despite being run down, is adorable . . . and it looks happy. And it’s clearly at home in its location. So there’s a distinct (and unusual) visual image, but the whole thing is fairly simple, with just small birdhouse and its wooden background. It definitely has an “Americana” feel. We’ve been working on color, and font (I usually like modernist fonts, but that just doesn’t fit the vibe of this photo), and placement of my name and the title, so we’re not completely done yet. But I love that, in a way I could never have generated myself, Adam so perfectly managed to find a simple and unexpected image that nevertheless conveys the feel that the CD is going for.