3 album covers in our archive
Dave Matthews Band's 1990s album covers change visual language almost completely from record to record, even while a recurring creative collaborator helps connect them. Under the Table and Dreaming uses a photograph of an amusement ride, Crash pivots into abstract illustration, and Before These Crowded Streets returns to photographic urban imagery. Read together, the sleeves show a band building recognition without relying on a fixed logo, portrait style or repeated cover formula.
Cover evolution
Visual history
Under the Table and Dreaming introduces the major-label era with a photographic cover built around a chair-o-planes-style amusement ride. Release credits identify Thane Kerner and Dave Matthews with the art direction/design and Stuart Dee with the cover photograph, making the image a useful starting point for the band's 1990s visual history.
Crash moves in the opposite direction. Instead of a recognizable place or photographed object, the sleeve is dominated by abstract, gestural artwork. Before These Crowded Streets changes direction again, returning to an urban photographic image within a package credited to Thane Kerner and Dave Matthews for design and art direction. The sequence is notable precisely because the covers do not try to look alike.
The strongest connective tissue across these sleeves is not a mascot or color palette but the design relationship itself. Thane Kerner is credited across Dave Matthews Band's 1990s packaging, with Dave Matthews also participating in art direction or design on key releases. That continuity helps explain how the records can look radically different while still belonging to the same visual era.
For an album-cover archive, that distinction matters: a band's visual identity can come from a continuing creative partnership rather than from repeating the same graphic device. DMB's early major-label covers are a good example of collaboration creating continuity through change.
The three covers create an unusually clean visual progression. Under the Table and Dreaming begins with a photographed amusement-ride structure. Crash strips away that literal subject in favor of abstract marks. Before These Crowded Streets then brings recognizable urban space back into the frame.
That progression gives the artist page a purpose beyond collecting thumbnails. It lets the covers be read as a short design history: object, abstraction, city — three different solutions for presenting the same band during its commercial breakthrough decade.
Thane Kerner is a recurring credited designer and art director across the band's 1990s packaging. Dave Matthews is also credited with art direction or design on releases including Under the Table and Dreaming and Before These Crowded Streets.
The cover photograph shows a chair-o-planes or Wave Swinger-style amusement ride. Stuart Dee is credited with the cover photography, while Thane Kerner and Dave Matthews are credited with the package's art direction/design.
Read the cover story →Crash is built around abstract artwork rather than a conventional band portrait or photographed location. That makes it the visual outlier between the photographic imagery of Under the Table and Dreaming and Before These Crowded Streets.
Read the cover story →The sleeve uses urban street imagery and is often associated with Manhattan, but the exact intersection should not be treated as settled without a direct primary-source confirmation. Behind the Covers distinguishes that reported identification from the design and art-direction credits that are documented in the release record.
Read the cover story →
A city street at dusk, a yellow taxi blurred into a streak of speed, and a ring of red that looks like wine staining glass. Dave Matthews Band's 1998 album dethroned the Titanic soundtrack after four straight months at the top. Here is the cover that greeted that arrival.
Thane Kerner's abstract illustration for Dave Matthews Band's breakthrough sophomore album has become synonymous with the band's visual identity. The enigmatic cover features flowing organic forms in muted earth tones, complemented by C. Taylor Crothers' band photography.
The debut Dave Matthews Band album points its camera straight up at a spinning swing carousel, blurring riders into streaks of motion against a bruised purple sky. Shot at an Ohio amusement park, it turns a childhood ride into something dizzy and dreamlike, exactly matching a title about being under the table and dreaming.
