An album needs art. Album art is what linguists would call a "fixed phrase". An idiom. It's not just art in the context of an album, as if the two words were jammed together by happenstance to be decoded literally. We're talking about an institution; a tradition; a vital part of what makes a thing an album and not just a bunch of music played in sequence.

A lot of the songs on Manifests have very specific associations for me, beyond what's explicitly revealed in the lyrics and the recordings. I talk about some of these things over on the Songs pages, and in the Notebook, but the drawings featured here fill in some of the gaps as well.

Or at least they try. I'm only lately taking drawing more seriously, and so these images are a compromise between what I was thinking and what I could render. Like the album itself, they were done quickly and with a kind of enthusiastic, sloppy care.

Click on any of the thumbnails to see the whole image.