12 cover stories in our archive
Behind the Covers' archive includes 12 album covers documented under the "painting" design theme, spanning the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2010s, 2020s. These covers sit within the hip-hop, blues, jazz, rock, folk, alternative, country, electronic, pop, world, indie tradition and feature work by Mac Miller, Robert Johnson, The Dave Brubeck Quartet, Billy Joel and others. Each entry below includes the cover artwork, the designers and photographers behind it, and a short story about the visual choices that defined the release.
A painted portrait of Mac Miller by Alim Smith became the centerpiece for this posthumous album's Grammy-nominated package, designed by Portuguese artist Bráulio Amado. Miller commissioned the artwork in 2016 for this experimental 2014 recording.
Released in 1961 without any known photos of Johnson, Columbia commissioned artist Burt Goldblatt to paint a faceless musician in field clothes. The overhead view painting became an iconic blues cover that influenced a generation of rock musicians.
S. Neil Fujita's abstract painting for Time Out broke jazz album cover conventions, replacing typical band photos with bold modernist art that visually mirrored the experimental odd-time signatures within.
The haunting cover of Piano Man features what many assumed were manipulated photographs but are actually photorealistic acrylic paintings by Bill Imhoff, one of Columbia Records' go-to album artists. The front and back cover paintings were originally gifted to Joel's manager before eventually being sold.
Bob Dylan painted the mysterious abstract artwork for The Band's debut album cover while living with them in Woodstock. The Nobel Prize winner's only album cover art was created in the same pink house where these legendary sessions took place.
Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation features a detail from Gerhard Richter's 1983 painting "Kerze" (Candle), cropped so tightly that most viewers don't realize they're looking at a candle flame. The band discovered the German artist's photorealistic painting in a book and used it without permission, creating one of alternative rock's most enigmatic covers.
A Columbia producer heard it and snapped, 'It's a piece of shit! It's not produced.' Recorded cheap in a Garland, Texas studio with barely more than guitar, piano, and drums, Willie Nelson's spare murder-ballad concept album turned a dismissed 'demo' into the record that made him a superstar.
An oil painting of Richard D. James's face in classical portraiture style — his broad, slightly sinister grin rendered with Old Master technique — satirizes fine art conventions while establishing the Aphex Twin's unsettling grin as a recurring visual motif.
A blazing red square hides a secret behind a wall of pixels: George Condo's phoenix painting, deliberately built by Kanye West to get banned. The story of how a nude monster with a polka-dot tail and no arms sparked a retail war and a Nirvana comparison.
Mati Klarwein's Afro-psychedelic painting depicts two Black faces in profile surrounded by swirling organic forms — flowers, waves, fire, and cosmic phenomena — a visual match for the album that essentially invented jazz fusion.
A red, winged, tattooed angel points skyward over a conga drum while a naked dark-skinned Mary sits among flowers and a white dove. Carlos Santana spotted this painting in a magazine and demanded it for his band's 1970 album — and it ended up pinned inside a shaman's hut and a Rastafarian's truck worldwide.
A guitarist learned to paint like Jackson Pollock, then nailed three slices of lemon to his canvas. The reason involves a 65-year-old Parisian, tear gas, and student riots from twenty years before The Stone Roses pressed a single note.