KEAPHOPE INTRO
It’s not a secret I’m a fan of cover art. From working on my own adaptations for singles to KeapHope’s recent project with Tanya Morgan for, The Sandwich Shop EP, my interest in cover art goes back to a time when the image, color and concept that surrounded a packaged piece of music was as much a part of the purchase process as hitting play for that first time. I remember buying, The Life and Times of S. Carter Vol 3, with the classic Jay-z intro and his statement “If you’re like me you’re reading the credits right now,” well that is who I was. I loved opening a CD. Trying not to crack the jewel case when I would pop off the cover tray (this made getting that pesky top sticker off a lot easier) to the smell of the liner note insert. I may have have grown up a bit late for the Vinyl revolution but trust that CD purchases were a regular occurrence. Every Tuesday it was off to the local shop to pick up something, anything, and much of those early purchases were stemmed from what looked good. It wasn’t as easy to preview tracks from an album or check a leak, we were making decisions based on what spoke to us from the shelf. Often the familiarity of a project or its features could spark dropping a cool $15 on a new CD, but I loved looking at those covers. I still keep a few hundred CD’s around my apartment in a big ass binder, and all those CD have the liner notes sitting in their protective sleeves. I hated those cardboard cases that wouldn’t have anything inside to throw up in the binder.

It’s funny how times have changed. As music has gone to a mostly digital world we’ve lost a lot of the importance of cover art and overall branding that used to go into making a project stand out. We’ve seen some recent examples of good work here and there, and its those exceptions that inspired this conversation to start. While distracting myself on twitter from the growing mountain of work for the day job I checked the homie Richie Cruz’s twitter update talking about a release with something special, Curren$y’s upcoming, Pilot Talk. Richie was praising the originality of the artwork, and reading his statement, I found myself nodding in agreement and immediately emailed Richie to talk about getting this conversation going. After a quick lunch, we found ourselves on the same page with music art. We will be sharing these musing both here on KeapHope and on Richie’s personal blog, Suits Is Watching.

Over the coming weeks Richie and I will take some time to present one upcoming project a week and dig into the details that round out these releases creatively, beyond the music, to make them standout among the seemingly thousands of free downloads, mixtape, torrent searches and classic releases that fill our itunes daily. We begin with the project that launched the discussion, Curren$y’s, Pilot Talk.

After the jump, intro thoughts from Suits Is Watching and our conversation on Pilot Talk