Larry M. Coleman

I’m lucky to be old enough to remember vinyl albums before they made a comeback. In the pre-internet (and therefore, pre-streaming) days, art was harder to come by, and therefore more valued and valuable.

My museum was the shelf of records my parents had. There were at least a hundred album covers to admire, and under the pool table that was next to the stereo was the art gallery where I studied them for hours. I even tried drawing some of them, but it eventually became clear that being able to appreciate art and being able to draw it are two different skills and while I had the one, I didn’t have the other.

As music has become less crafted, with less and less work put into creating it, it has become more disposable, and one of the first things to have been disposed with is the album art. Last week’s fiction inspiration post was an album cover from 1982, when album art was at its peak. This week’s is from a 2005 release by Saint Etienne, over twenty years later. Even in the twilight of creative album art, they’ve kept the flame alive with their covers, as their discography shows.

Cross-disciplinary sources of inspiration are important to any artist—it’s a boring dish that doesn’t draw from meats or vegetables or spices from many sources, and it’s a boring writer who can only draw from writing. Art, music, art + music, photography, dance, architecture, film, food, nature… the entire range of human experience is your well to drink from as a writer.

That’s what makes this cover so interesting. There are so many of those things in it. So many stories. The girl looking shyly over her shoulder at the top left. Is she shy or surprised in a happy way to hear the knock at the door that she’s been waiting for? If so, who’s knocking? The mailman delivering a letter she’s been waiting for? The man she’s ready for a date for? Maybe the room below that’s empty is his room and they’ve run into each other on the stairway (let’s make this building a walk-up) several times and they finally set something up. There’s no one in it right now because he’s standing on the other side of the door he just knocked on, setting her heart flying.

The woman at the 1970s-era kitchen table all alone in the center. She’s having tea. An empty wineglass is tipped. Another sits full next to it. Had she poured two glasses expecting someone, then got stood up?

Next to her is someone either going to bed after a long day or waking up for another night shift. Her dog awaits or is in position to watch over her as she sleeps. If she’s getting up for the night shift, what does she do for a living?

The two girls on the couch at the bottom left don’t look pleased to see us. We’ve interrupted a conversation we weren’t invited to be a part of. The door is open as if someone left for just a moment to pop out for beer or soda or to get something from their apartment—maybe a book from the room above. But look at the light fixture: a single bare bulb. What does that say about their apartment compared to the stylish decorations in the other rooms? And the cactus versus the flowers in the room at the upper left.

The girl at the bottom left. Is she wearing a leotard? Is she an aspiring dancer just having finished her nightly exercises before laying down on her sparsely-constructed bed? Did she just get to an intense part of her book and needs to pause and reflect on it or gather the courage to plow through the rest of an intensely-emotional scene? Or is that a script and she’s mentally rehearsing her part? What does the old television sitting on a box say about where she’s at in her life at the moment? The bottle with no glasses?

All these stories from just one cover, but take a look at the one with two different versions of the cover side by side:

How do the changes in coloring change the whole feel of the decorating? The colors are still soft, but so much different. The young woman looking shy or eager at the top left is now an old lady having a meal alone. The girl from the top left is now in the center, getting ready for a dinner with friends or her lover. The bedroom is now empty, its occupant possibly at work at the job they had to drag themselves to in the other cover. The couch now has only one person, and the open door means something entirely different because of it. The other occupant of the couch is moved to the adjoining room and is watching TV. The album cover is the same, but the stories are not.

And don’t leave out the room at the top right of both covers. It’s not just vacant, but empty. Emptiness, negative space, is a space of its own, with its own meaning.

I don’t want to make the Friday Fiction Inspiration series all about album art. It’s a coincidence that the last two have been from albums, but they won’t be the last. In fact, this won’t even be the last one from Saint Etienne in particular, because their album cover for Words and Music is a literal roadmap of whimsy, and a post analyzing a cute storytelling device hidden in the music video for their 2017 release “Dive” is in the pipeline for September.

Writing often carries you to places you didn’t intend to go to when you sat down, and even this post did that for me. As I’ve thought about it while writing this, I think my parents’ record collection is the reason I had the top shelf be divided into two for my CD collection when I was having the bookshelf I’ve always wanted (one that spans an entire wall of my study) be built.

I’ve studied the covers of each of those CDs and read the liner notes to each one, although I’ve only read half of the books below them. Someday I’ll have world enough and time. Someday. Until then, there are just so many stories to write.