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Dead flowers. Blue feathers. Cigarette butts. A teapot. Toy giraffes. Brian Eno looking like a glamorous ghost. And, hiding in plain sight, a naughty playing card that seems to explain exactly what “Here Come the Warm Jets” means. Except it doesn’t. That story is considerably stranger—and considerably more Eno. Grab a copy and listen along with us. Questions, comments, recommendations? We’d love to hear from you at Albumartthecoverstories@gmail.com

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For twenty years, nobody knew who the woman on this album cover was—including the woman herself. She became one of hardcore’s most recognizable faces, appearing on shirts, posters, patches and tattoos around the world. Then one day a French model looked at the cover and thought: Wait a minute. That’s me. Grab a copy and listen along with us. Questions, comments, recommendations? We’d love to hear from you at Albumartthecoverstories@gmail.com.

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It took two hours, a $300 studio bill, and a Boris Karloff impression to make a Halloween song that just won’t die. From Hollywood wannabes to a bubbling beaker of sound effects, The Original Monster Mash rose from the lab in 1962 and never went back in the grave. The album cover? A cartoony graveyard party so cheap it’s scary. Grab a copy and listen along with us.
Questions, comments, recommendations? We’d love to hear from you at Albumartthecoverstories@gmail.com or check our Spotify Song List with a song from each album we’ve covered.

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Grace Slick didn’t merely sing on Manhole—she ruled over it like a psychedelic rock goddess. She wrote, produced, played, commanded a 42-piece orchestra, and created every strange inch of the album’s artwork herself. Even the title was a wickedly sarcastic response to the women’s liberation movement that almost nobody understood. This is Grace unleashed: imperious, outrageous, funny, and gloriously unconcerned with what anyone thought. Grab a copy and listen along with us. Questions, comments, recommendations? We'd love to hear from you at Albumartthecoverstories@gmail.com or check our Spotify Song List with a song from each album we have covered:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2NrDU39yE9CJcHU6YJT8jj?si=Y1JAE4LWTDmKEDE9QGlB2A&pi=ly2xwE-ERRu-2

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he cool-looking couple on the cover of Sonic Youth’s Goo look like killers on the run—and the caption says they murdered her parents. There’s just one problem. They weren’t killers. They were on their way to court to help put two of Britain’s most notorious serial murderers behind bars. Raymond Pettibon had no idea who they were when he drew them. Add an album that was almost called Blowjob, a fictional punk-rock girlfriend named Goo, a record company begging the band to reconsider, and a cover that eventually became “folk art,” and you’ve got quite a story. Grab a copy and listen along with us. Questions, comments, recommendations? We’d love to hear from you at Albumartthecoverstories@gmail.com or check our Spotify Song List with a song from each album we’ve covered.

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Eddie Vedder spent a few bucks at a garage sale and came home with a battered 1920s medical book that may have ended up costing Pearl Jam $2 million. It warned that masturbation could cause epilepsy, insanity and “moral imbecility”—so naturally the band decided it would make a great album package. They borrowed its name, its illustrations, its bizarre advice and even turned the CD into a miniature book. The result was Vitalogy, one of the strangest and most expensive packaging decisions of the CD era. Grab a copy and listen along with us.

Questions, comments, recommendations? We'd love to hear from you at Albumartthecoverstories@gmail.com or check our Spotify Song List with a song from each album we’ve covered:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2NrDU39yE9CJcHU6YJT8jj?

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What do you get when an album called Trout Mask Replica needs a cover and the art director goes to a fish market and buys a carp? You hollow out the head, convince Captain Beefheart to hold the stinking thing over his face for a couple of hours, add an enormous black hat and a blazing pink-red background—and create one of the strangest album covers ever made. Why a carp instead of a trout? Whose idea was this anyway? And what happened as that fish got warmer? Grab a copy and listen along with us. Questions, comments, recommendations? We’d love to hear from you at Albumartthecoverstories@gmail.com or check our Spotify Song List with a song from each album we’ve covered:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2NrDU39yE9CJcHU6YJT8jj?si=Y1JAE4LWTDmKEDE9QGlB2A&pi=ly2xwE-ERRu-2

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William Basinski was trying to save some old tapes. Instead, he recorded them dying. Weeks later, he watched the World Trade Center disappear from the Brooklyn skyline and filmed the last hour of daylight over Manhattan. Somehow, the dying music and those haunting images found each other. Four albums. Four covers. Each one darker than the last. And an album-cover story that nobody could possibly have planned. Grab a copy and listen along with us. Questions, comments, recommendations? We’d love to hear from you at Albumartthecoverstories@gmail.com