A note on the album art

From Wikipedia:

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters or The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters, Francisco Goya, c. 1799, etching aquatint drypoint and burin

The full epigraph for Capricho No. 43 reads; “Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her [reason], she [fantasy] is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels.”

Inspired by some of my favorite albums (Fleet Foxes and The Phosphorescent Blues) I decided to choose some art in the public domain that I felt expanded the story of the songs. This was selected after everything was mixed and sent off for mastering. For me it adds a layer of perspective on the music. The lyrics shape a problem fueled by pessimism, doubt, dread. These are real problems, but it is not the entire picture. I appreciate how in “The Sleep of Reason” we see the very real monsters that we are prey to when falling asleep. The album does not spend much time with the writer at the desk when they’re awake, but then, neither does Goya.

Finally, (go look this up from Sister Wendy’s book of Lenten art) a runner-up choice for the album art was not chosen because it’s not in the public domain. I am still drawn to it for its literal darkness that contains lots of isolated containers, in other words, all of us isolated containers making up a composite image.

A note on the title: 

As mentioned in the lyric notes, the lyric/title “In The Dark” comes directly from the writing of Sarah Ruhl, but I can’t help but mention my fondness for the phrase thanks to Daniel Handler as Lemony Snicket in “The End” (the 13th and final book of A Series of Unfortunate Events).

Although I was unable to really include it in the song itself, it still rings in my head when I think of the phrase. At most I hope it reiterates the point that these songs tell a complete story with incomplete information (another angle on the Goya piece), but at its least it is still a nod to an artistic hero of mine.

“The phrase “in the dark,” as I’m sure you know, can refer not only to one’s shadowy surroundings, but also to the shadowy secrets of which one might be unaware. Every day, the sun goes down over all these secrets, and so everyone is in the dark in one way or another. If you are sunbathing in a park, for instance, but you do not know that a locked cabinet is buried fifty feet beneath your blanket, then you are in the dark even though you are not actually in the dark, whereas if you are on a midnight hike, knowing full well that several ballerinas are following close behind you, then you are not in the dark even if you are in fact in the dark. Of course, it is quite possible to be in the dark in the dark, as well as to be not in the dark not in the dark, but there are so many secrets in the world that it is likely that you are always in the dark about one thing or another, whether you are in the dark in the dark or in the dark not in the dark, although the sun can go down so quickly that you may be in the dark about being in the dark in the dark, only to look around and find yourself no longer in the dark about being in the dark in the dark, but in the dark in the dark nonetheless, not only because of the dark, but because of the ballerinas in the dark, who are not in the dark about the dark, but also not in the dark about the locked cabinet, and you may be in the dark about the ballerinas digging up the locked cabinet in the dark, even though you are no longer in the dark about being in the dark, and so you are in fact in the dark about being in the dark, even though you are not in the dark about being in the dark, and so you may fall into the hole that the ballerinas have dug, which is dark, in the dark, and in the park.” - Lemony Snicket from The End (13)

If I were to release some extended cut of the EP, it would surely be titled “In the dark in the dark”