Rating:  

I’ve been listening to Vota’s “debut” album for a few weeks now, and it’s really starting to grow on me. I was never a fan of Casting Pearls, which was Vota’s name before they changed it due to confusion with Casting Crowns. I think the name change was a great choice, because the new sound and name is like a fresh start for them, and I hope they make it big with this release.

The release is on INO which depresses me a bit because as Casting Pearls, Vota was signed to Inpop, the label I work for. I wish Inpop had released this album, because I love it.

The album photoshoot was done by none other than Jeremy Cowart, my favorite photographer (who I recently met for the first time) in Nashville with a helicopter to make it one of the coolest album covers of 2008 in my opinion…

My favorite song by far is “Hard To Believe” followed by “Love’s Taken Over”, “Be Mine”, “Free To Fail” and “Bye Bye” which has a strong Maroon5 vibe.

I may or may not be designing a tour poster for a newsboys/Vota tour this spring, so keep on the lookout for that!

An oldie but goody. Was shown this by the guys in Superchick a few days ago.

“What happens when you play back a prerecorded synthesizer track at 48K instead of the intended 44.1K? The whole track plays back a little bit faster and at a slightly higher pitch, that’s what. A dissonant musical mess ensues, trapping the guitarist and bassist in an on-stage musical hell with nowhere to go.”

If you had told me last year that by this time next year there would be a Newsboys AND Superchick album out with my name in the credits I would have thought you were crazy and probably said “ya, in my dreams”. I really don’t know how it happened, it’s just God’s awesome work as usual. 

The Superchick album, Rock What You Got, has been out a while now… but the Newsboys live album just came out a few days ago. It’s amazing. Oh FYI… Newsboys is my favorite band of all time incase that wasn’t obvious. 

The album was definitely one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done because I put myself under so much pressure to make the design awesome. After lots of revisions I started to realize that when you work with clients that already have a super strong and consistent brand, in the end you must work with that brand and not fight it, no matter how tempting it may be to make the design completely your own. 

Case in point, check out all the revisions. Notice the one that deviates from the rest? That one was probably my personal favorite. I am really happy with the end result, even if it wasn’t my favorite. A few of my photos were used in the packaging and I did do most the art direction and all the design/layout except for the photo collage on the cover, which was already made a while back (and had been used on some promo material for the GO tour) by David Dobson.

If you like the Newsboys, this is a great cd/dvd to own. Be sure you buy a hard copy tho, so you get the actual full concert DVD and my beautiful packaging, and not just the iTunes version. Better yet, buy both!