4 cover stories in our archive
Behind the Covers' archive includes 4 album covers documented under the "self portrait" design theme, spanning the 1990s, 2000s, 2020s. These covers sit within the alternative, indie, folk, electronic tradition and feature work by Fiona Apple, Neko Case, Aphex Twin. 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.
Fiona Apple shot this intimate cover herself in her Venice Beach home during lockdown, creating a raw self-portrait that mirrors the album's themes of breaking free from constraints.
Neko Case commissioned Vancouver illustrator Julie Morstad for Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. Morstad was already making drawings informed by Russian folklore when she and Case discovered the same folklore thread behind the album title; her delicate, macabre illustration became the cover.
The cover of Fiona Apple's When the Pawn... is inseparable from the album's famously long title, a 90-word poem Apple wrote after reading hostile letters about herself in SPIN. Apple is credited with the cover-art concept and design, turning the sleeve into part portrait, part rebuttal, and part declaration of control over how she would be seen.
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.