It's All My Fault!
My beautiful faux tarot card by Calvaleigh Rasmussen
My recording engineer, Derek Bianchi, and I have finished the recording, editing, and mixing; the mastering is done and the master copy in hand. But I'm not done yet! Now, I begin the task of producing artifacts. After all the writing, arranging, recording with wonderful people, and massaging these songs to life, I must pour them into a format so people can listen - a CD! (Cue the trumpet fanfare and radiant beams shining from a silver disc!) An album cover must be produced! Text describing the songs and crediting all who helped me bring them into being needs to be generated. Images have to be imagined, made real, and then incorporated into a format that allows a manufacturer to make replicated copies of YOUR FOOL!
And so, in the name of progress, I'm excited to share the image for the front cover of the album. I turned to the song titles for naming-inspiration, hoping to find something that sort of bound the songs together, and also suggest an image to use on the cover. Your Fool, one of the songs, conjured all sorts of ideas. I could be considered a fool for creating such an anti-thematic album of songs! Then, I thought of the Rider-Waite tarot card of The Fool, with the youth perched on the precipice (see below). This got me to thinking of the many interpretations for the meaning of this card in a tarot reading: depending on the influence of other cards laid out with it, it can signify new beginnings, the need to not take life too seriously, or even...RECKLESSNESS. All these seem to be in play for me with this album, so I asked my artist-daughter, Calvaleigh Rasmussen, if she could create a watercolor of a mock-tarot card. She included my "totem animal" the raven, a red rose was substituted for the white one on the real card (because red is better), a woman (who coincidentally looks a bit like me) has hurled herself into the risks of the future, and the lacy sock from the song is also in the picture. (You'll have to listen to find out about the sock!) I love it, and several other little images that you'll find on the album, once I've got the text and images combined!
Lastly, I spent most of an afternoon filing for copyrights to all the songs for the album. They're all original - lyrics and music - except for one, a poem that I put to music. You may remember that I wrote about Violet Jacob (1843-1946), a Scottish makar (look it up), who wrote "songs" and poems in Lowland Scots, and wrote a wonderful novel called Flemington. I borrowed her poem, Heid Horseman to set to music. But everything else? Well, it's ALL my fault!