In May 2024 I took the month off of work to, among other things, write and produce a 3-song EP.
I gave myself the limit of a single month. I was completely unsure if I could do it or not but determined to make it happen.
It all came together. I spent most of my days writing and recording, and on the last day of May I had to call it finished. The songs were sent off to a mix engineer and aftward a mastering engineer. After two months of hard work, it was ready.
There was only one thing left to make: the album artwork.
Problem: I had absolutely no idea what to do for it.
Should I just use some random yet meaningful photo I had taken in the past? Should I hire out an artist I liked to try and come up with something good?
No idea.
Just do it.
The songs were ready to go and I was aching to have the album out in the world.
So on a simple Friday morning I realized if I kept overthinking something like this I would never get it out into the world.
I grabbed my camera, chucked on an old 50mm lens, sat on my back porch, and took a dozen self portraits. Used a timer and clicked the shutter.
After scanning through them and picking out a few I liked, I streamed them to my phone and did some playful editing to my liking.
Within 20 minutes of deciding to do something, I had an album cover.
I don't think it's an award-winning photo. I don't even know if it's the best photo I could have taken for this album. But it felt right and it didn't take a long time, which was the spirit of the creation of this album in the first place.
Artistry and creativity lean hard on "getting it right", but people often miss that getting it right sometimes just means getting it done and letting it be done.
I could have spent a weekend scouting locations and getting someone to help and combing through hundreds of photos, but in the end the photo was what I wanted it to be: finally a picture of me attached to the music I was making.
And honestly I do kind of like it, and if I like it I think that's all that really matters.