The Story
I sent an ambient track I had been working on to my good friend and longtime musical cohort, Andy Faunch, in late 2019. He loved it and admonished me to continue along in that vein, so I thunk up the idea of doing a full album of ambient material. I ended up spreading the tracks across my first two official album releases in March and April of 2020, and I called them 13 Moons (PART 1) and 13 Moons (PART 2). Being called 13 Moons, there were, of course, 13 tracks among the two albums, eight on the first and five on the second. I put together a lot of different iterations of 'moon pics’ for cover art ideas, but nothing was totally clicking for me. Then I hit on the idea of placing an abstract photograph of my son swimming around in the deep end of our pool one night as the background for the moon, somewhat grounding the art with an eerie, out-of-body human perspective, but which also incorporated little astral skews of light, making for an ethereal ‘what is this?’ sort of background. I shot the picture of my son when he was a little boy as he was treading water in the deep end of our pool one night, creating a ghostly image that I thought might work well underneath a picture of the moon, centerstage. None of my own moon pics were up to the task, so I purchased a beauty of a moonshot to use off the interwebs, and I was off.
For PART 2 I left the cover art the same but altered the bg colorway so that the two related covers create a matched pair, easily interpreted as a first and second in a series (something I would do again with some of Bret Helm’s work).
NightSwim, the photo of my son Will from the year 2002 that I worked up to become the background for the 13 Moons project album covers. This picture still hangs in what was the boys' bathroom in our home. I don't think either one of them ever knew what it was...
FINALS:
Done. /\/\
