20 cover stories in our archive
Behind the Covers' archive includes 20 album covers documented under the "painting" design theme, spanning the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, 2020s. These covers sit within the hip-hop, pop, rock, electronic, alternative, indie, metal, country, punk, world, jazz, folk, blues tradition and feature work by Mac Miller, Kanye West, Radiohead, Aphex Twin 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.
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.
Radiohead's Kid A wears a range of barbed, snow-blasted peaks with fire pouring from their summits. Stanley Donwood painted those canvases with knives and sticks, and a Kosovo war photo of debris in snow lit the fuse. One late Oxfordshire night, too many cover versions were taped to a fridge until the right one announced itself.
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.
Trent Reznor gave a British collagist three words: attrition, wound, decay. Russell Mills answered with a two-foot panel built from plaster, rusted metal, dead insects, surgical bandages, and his own blood. The result stares back from The Downward Spiral like something scraped from a fevered wall.
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.
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.
Rick Rubin phoned a political illustrator who was drawing for the Village Voice and asked him to imagine hell. What Larry Carroll delivered was a three-foot canvas of goat-headed rulers and dangling bodies that Kerry King once dismissed as the work of a 'warped demented freak' before admitting it redefined metal.
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.
David Bowie posed as a half-man, half-dog for a 1974 painting so explicit that RCA airbrushed out the creature's genitals. The few uncensored copies that slipped into shops became some of the priciest records ever traded. The twist? The Belgian artist who painted it says Bowie tricked him into the job.
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.
The face on Dolly Parton's 1971 cover isn't a glamour shot. It's a painted schoolboy-cut child in a patchwork coat of blue and rust, based on a photo snapped the same day young Dolly was teased for that homemade coat. The painting became the emblem of a song written on a dry-cleaning receipt.
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.
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.
When Decca wanted The Who's faces on the cover of Tommy, they cut tiny windows into Mike McInnerney's blue diamond-sphere and slipped the band inside. The result: a deaf, dumb and blind boy's world, pressed against the glass of an infinite cage.
A screaming face fills every inch of King Crimson's 1969 debut: terror painted in pink, red and bruised purple. It was the only painting Barry Godber ever made, and he modeled the horror on his own face in a mirror. Months later, at 24, he was dead.
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.
A London store's mass-produced Hindu devotional poster became the frame for a rock band: Jimi Hendrix and his bandmates painted as arms of the god Vishnu, glowing in pink, orange and turquoise. Hendrix hated it. Decades later, a nation's censors seized copies. Here is the strange life of a cover its own star disowned.
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.