Analyzing album covers: Say you will

[Villavic]

And now.. Say you will. Your thoughts about the album cover?

[Villavic]

I don't like the cover that much. Not that I dislike, but there's something missing. Probably Stevie and/or Lindsey fans love the picture, but IMHO it looks more like a Buckingham Nicks album than a Fleetwood Mac. I would have included a Mac or Fleetwood member, and in this case I'd choose John.

Maybe John and Lindsey would have made a cool picture, like in the Rumours days. If it worked for the back cover, why not for the front this time?

[WildHearted]

Originally Posted by Villavic

I don't like the cover that much. Not that I dislike, but there's something missing. Probably Stevie and/or Lindsey fans love the picture, but IMHO it looks more like a Buckingham Nicks album than a Fleetwood Mac. I would have included a Mac or Fleetwood member, and in this case I'd choose John.

Maybe John and Lindsey would have made a cool picture, like in the Rumours days. If it worked for the back cover, why not for the front this time?

Well, Mick and John are on the back, aren't they?

Kind of like the Mirage cover in a sense, only without Christine.

[michelej1]

Love it. Bought the Criteria Collection version of this movie, just because of the album cover. Had a lengthy post about Lindsey and the paper merchant, but I don't know whether it was here or on fmlegacy.

Anyway, aesthetically, Stevie's waved hair and nicked waist looks great and I am sure there is a name for figures that interlock, but I don't know what it is. Whatever, that's what Lindsey and Stevie look like, interlocking puzzle pieces waiting to be pushed together to be made whole. Yin and yang.

Ostensibly facing opposite ends, but the differences make the joinder possible, but it also has a sensual component. I mean, it suggests artistic and physical combination.

I love the black and white and just the red for the title. That's borrowed from the Double Suicide cover too, as is Stevie's outfit, even though she's not in a kimono. The flow of her top is modeled after the movie.

LOVE IT.

It's not my number one, because I'm always going to have 3 songwriters on my covers, but SYW is my #2.

Michele

[cantgoback]

It's kinda boring, it seems like they didn't try to focus on the cover, just the album, which is ok since the music is good. It's just kinda boring. It's not intriguing like Rumours, Mirage, Fleetwood Mac, Or Tango. It's just kinda... there.

[Villavic]

Originally Posted by WildHearted

Well, Mick and John are on the back, aren't they?

Kind of like the Mirage cover in a sense, only without Christine.

Oh yes, that's true, but probably the non-fans, general public.. will remember just the front cover. In Mirage case, Christine is a "Mac", so it is not so B/N style cover.

I agree with cantgoback it's boring and not intriguing.

[redbird]

I wish John and Mick were on the cover too, if it's going to feature any band members. I also can't get into the wood grain, of all things, and I'm not really into the way Stevie's hair fans out.

"Say You Will" felt like two solo albums spliced together so w.r.t. that the cover's appropriate, and black/white/red is one of my favorite color combinations, but it still feels a little generic to me.

[elle]

Originally Posted by WildHearted

Well, Mick and John are on the back, aren't they?

Kind of like the Mirage cover in a sense, only without Christine.

i was going to type exactly this! someone posted the whole SYW cover, back and front (like Mirage whole cover was posted) in one of the threads recently.

i think it's great execution of a cool idea behind it.

however i love simplicity of the SYW deluxe red cover even more.

[FierySequences]

It's art based on art, I love it.

What is this Double Suicide Michelle is refering to? I remember reading it was based off of an Asian artist, but I can't recall the whole concept. Was DS an Asian film?

It also follows in the theme with them all in bed for RS cover.

[michelej1]

Originally Posted by FierySequences

It's art based on art, I love it.

What is this Double Suicide Michelle is refering to? I remember reading it was based off of an Asian artist, but I can't recall the whole concept. Was DS an Asian film?

It also follows in the theme with them all in bed for RS cover.

It is taken from the famous movie Double Suicide. You can see the cover on Amazon. That is what SnL are modeled after.

Michele

[Villavic]

Originally Posted by michelej1

It is taken from the famous movie Double Suicide. You can see the cover on Amazon. That is what SnL are modeled after.

Michele

Yes. Can't be a coincidence

[I'msoAfraid95]

Its alright. They should of shown all of Mick and John, imo.

[michelej1]

I bet John felt rather silly lying down to be photographed like that. The other 3 are hams. Michele

[WildHearted]

Originally Posted by Villavic

Yes. Can't be a coincidence

Interesting. I've never heard of the movie before - here's the description from IMDB, for what it's worth:

In 18th Century in Japan, the paper merchant Jihei (Kichiemon Nakamura) falls in love for the courtesan Koharu (Shima Iwa****a), but he can not afford to redeem her from her master and owner of the brothel, since he spent all his money in the place with Koharu. Jihei's wife Osan tries to keep her husband with his two children and asks Koharu to leave him. The two lovers make a pact of double suicide to escape from the rigid rules of the Japanese society of 1720 and stay together after death.

[michelej1]

[I always liked this SYW concert review below, from Campus Circle which referenced the cover and riffed on the whole "never break the chain" theme that it can be interpreted to embody].

The cover of the new Say You Will has Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks lying prostrate, facing opposite directions with feet spilling off the top and bottom of the shot, in a visual nod to the iconic final image of Masahiro Shinoda’s Double Suicide. Does it seem pretentious for a band whose biggest radio hit is still the sunny "Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow" to draw parallels to the doomed lovers in a classic of Japanese cinema? It shouldn’t because no pop act exemplifies the rock-band-as-suicide-pact so perfectly as Fleetwood Mac. Buckingham and Nicks must glance across the stage at each other night after night, thinking over their years as lovers, as enemies and as mutually-indifferent playthings of fate, and pondering, with alternate bemusement and fury, the full and terrifying implications of the phrase "till death do us part."

This is one of the reasons why it was worth whatever the scalpers were charging in the parking lot to spend two hours and thirty minutes with Fleetwood Mac. But the band had plenty to offer on an individual basis, even divorced from the drama of just having its members collected in one place. It was deeply moving, for instance, to hear Nicks’s increasingly-weathered voice settling into "Gold Dust Woman" and the new disc’s title track with equal grace. And when she pulled out Tusk’s "Beautiful Child," as an unexpected treat, a hush fell over the room like we were hearing a proclamation from a queen, which I suppose we were.

Buckingham, on the other hand, ripped into his guitar with spellbinding passion. The new record is, after all, the solo album he had such difficulty getting released, tucked into a set of slightly uneven Nicks tunes to make it more palatable to record execs. His joy at airing these songs was palpable. Even on an out-of-the-park stunner like "Come," he’s still a middling-at-best lyricist, but as always his songs muddle through a couple of verses’ worth of maddening inarticulateness before exploding into guitar solos that express everything with stabbing precision.

There’s a wistful sense of the valedictory to the band’s shows nowadays that's absent from the record itself thanks to Buckingham’s fervor, which suggests that Fleetwood Mac is reaching the September of its years. But let’s hope that Buckingham’s stubborn refusal to let even chestnuts like "Never Going Back Again" sound dated indicates that he, at least, plans to soldier on for years to come.

–Steven Hanna