Amos Lee

About a month after school let out, the fabulous Burton Yount contacted me about joining him to create album art for Amos Lee's new release, Mission Bell under EMI's Blue Note Records.
I was really excited to be a part of this project from the beginning. This will probably be the most viewed piece of artwork I have created so far!

I was first asked to create custom lettering to go along with a photograph, but it soon turned out that Burton was looking for something a little more interesting. We did multiple versions of different themes until we got to our final:

Image copyrighted by EMI 2010

"Amos Lee has announced the January 25, 2011 release of Mission Bell, his fourth album for EMI's Blue Note Records, and his richest and most fully formed album to date. Mission Bell, which was produced by Joey Burns of the acclaimed band Calexico, displays both range and cohesion, an array of emotions unified by Lee's eclectic taste and distinctive vocals. With a remarkable set of guests--including Lucinda Williams, Willie Nelson, Sam Beam (Iron & Wine), Priscilla Ahn, Pieta Brown, and James Gadson--and the musical backing of Calexico, the album marks the arrival of Amos Lee as a mature artist who continues to explore his musical and thematic interests." -from Amazon's Product Review

The music is amazing, and this album is definitely going to be well received. We worked off of the western undertones and poetic lyricism to create a feel true to the music. Check out the sketch for the final below. Amos really wanted to keep things masculine, so the floral elements were out.
The typography was a challenge. One thing that we really found necessary with this project was not to be obvious. Sure, we wanted something Western, but we wanted to stray far far away from "cowboy." See some of my other thoughts below. At first we started with photographs of Amos. Here are some earlier versions before we really found the direction everyone agreed on.

The one above was one of my favorites!

Over the past few weeks Burton has been wrapping up the final design for the booklet and asked for some spot illustrations and a portrait for the back cover.

So that's that! Keep your eyes out to see it in stores, in the iTunes store, and on Amazon. And if you want to pre-order the album, which drops January 25th, visit the Amazon page!