Drafts of cover art for "Sydney Highrise Variations"

Here you have the core Poetry Scores production team at an earlier moment on this journey, waiting for food outside a crab shack in Maine ca. 1995. Traces of that lunch seem to have survived on the frame of this Polaroid.

We were Hoobellatoo, then, and working on what would become our first poetry score, Crossing America by Leo Connellan, a great poet of Maine.

This weekend we will convene in Nashville, with John Minkoff and Dave Melson, to finish our fourth poetry scores, The Sydney Highrise Variations, by a great poet of Australia, Les Murray.

Our production credit has shifted over the years, from Lij and Chris King (Crossing America), to just me (Blind Cat Black), to Matt and me (Go South for Animal Index and Sydney Highrise Variations), though Lij does most of the actual studio engineering (with lots of help from Adam Long).

This year's cover art is very much a trilogy group effort. Matt is doing the design, based on two of Lij's college architectural studies. It was my idea, when I saw the drawings hanging on the studio wall in Nashville, which makes me creative director - my actual title in Poetry Scores.

Every so often, the job matches up with its description.

Here are rough draft's of Matt's cover designs - the links open pdfs.

Rough draft of front cover

Rough draft of back cover