Even in this advanced digital age of mp3's and such, I still get a metric shit-ton of promo CD's and most fail to catch my eye when I'm looking right at them, but the cover of Guy Clark's amazing new album My Favorite Picture Of You had my full attention the moment it slid ever so timidly from the padded manilla envelope that had been its home for the past few days.
See, the picture Guy is holding is of his wife of 30 years, Susanna, who despite appearing young, radiant, a just a tad bit defiant in the photo, lost her battle with cancer in June of 2012.
The idea of such a personal momento being shown on an album cover is so disarming, but something you'd never see on a Beyonce or Mariah Carey album. See, those albums are product, pure and simple, and the lengths they go to Photoshop every last trace of humanity out of every head shot, every album cover, is par for the course.
For Guy Clark, albums...and album covers... are more like pages ripped from a diary, full of rich detail and emotion so real you can feel it pulling at your heart strings. To call it "product" at all is to do it a disservice.
Heck, I didn't even have the CD in the player yet and Clark already had me on the verge of blubbering.
Then I watched this YouTube clip:
For some odd reason, the honesty of Clark's album cover reminded me of another artist whose personal life spilled over into his album cover. The artist in question is David Allan Coe, whose Human Emotions album featured a pic of him on the back standing next to a tombstone and included an emotionally charged letter to his ex-wife. And get a load of that belt buckle. Can you imagine the scene, you're in a cemetery leaving some flowers on Aunt Edna's grave when some dude flies up in a Lincoln Town Car wearing a studded leather jacket, tattoos all over his chest, wearing sunglasses and a custom-made belt buckle with his name on it. Oh, and a camera crew.
Come to think of it, I miss the days when a total nut job (I say that with the utmost affection for the man and his music) like Coe could enjoy a lengthy career as a country artist. Listening to a David Allan Coe album used to be like catching up with an old friend whose nose for trouble knows no bounds.