Creating a collectable
A deep dive into the making of the vinyl edition of my debut album
Before the release of my debut album, I knew two things. Firstly, that I wanted it to be available on at least one physical format, and secondly, that much of of my audience - the embaes, if you will - were vinyl fans and collectors.
I also wanted people to be able to own a little piece of this landmark moment in my career and display it on their shelves, even if they didn’t have a record player. A permanent memento of this body of work.
This newsletter is dedicated to explaining the process of creating the vinyl edition of All Those Things I Thought I Knew from idea to completion.
I had heard many anecdotal horror stories about the increased costs and manufacturing backlogs for indie labels due to massive artists randomly deciding they were going to bring out their new album in every colour of the rainbow, so it was important that I started organising everything as early as possible.
After researching various companies in January 2023, I landed upon Breed Media, whose customer service was some of the best I’ve witnessed (I promise this is not a paid post). They were always there to swiftly answer even my most stupid of questions, and there’s no one else I would have had guiding me through the process.
After receiving a quote, the first thing I needed to do was gather the vinyl masters.
Although I wrote, recorded, produced and mixed the album, I also worked with a mastering engineer called Luca Martello from Major Oak Mastering, as it was important to me to get some other ears working on the final stage, in a sound treated room. Luca provided me with a separate set of vinyl and digital masters, so you might notice that the songs sound slightly different on the different formats.
For anyone who might not know, there are several stages to the completion of a track. First, the writing, recording and production process where you essentially make everything sound the way you want it to sound. Then comes the mixing process, where you make all of the different sounds work together, ensure there is ‘room’ for everything, nothing is clashing and the things you want to ‘pop’ are ‘popping’. The mastering process is like a final enhancement, with a particular focus on ensuring the track is up to an industry standard volume.
After supplying the vinyl masters to Breed Media, it was time to move on to creating the artwork.
As you may remember from previous newsletters, I ended up with rather less of a budget than I had anticipated for this project, so this meant I had to be the one creating it.
I’d opted for a standard sleeve design with a white ‘inner’ (basically the thing the vinyl sits inside) and an eight page booklet. The album would fit on one 12” black vinyl.
The booklet was a particularly vital inclusion for me, as I grew up learning to sing songs by my favourite artists with the lyric booklets that came with their CDs. I loved flicking through them to analyse what everything meant, and who was credited for each track - there was nothing more exciting to me (and still isn’t to be fair) than unwrapping a brand new album and reading the lyrics as I listened for the first time. I really wanted my listeners to be able to experience that with my work.
Breed Media sent over a bunch of PDF templates for each area of the packaging. I needed to design the front and back covers of the sleeve - not forgetting the tiny spine - along with the labels on the vinyl itself, and each page of the booklet.
I had agonised over whether to have mysterious, image-only album artwork or not, but eventually decided that it was more important that people coming across the record by chance knew immediately what the album was called and who had made it.
So the next stage was picking a font. I trawled website upon website and made various samples of my artist name and the album title.
Eventually, I landed upon my choice of three different fonts - one for my artist name, one for the name of my label Zirconia Records and one for the ‘main font’ which would be used not only on the album artwork but also across my social media and marketing materials during the All Those Things I Thought I Knew ‘era’.
Once settled on the fonts, it was time for an even harder process. Choosing the main image from the photos I had taken with Madison Fiorenza on two separate shoots during January.
I had narrowed it down to two choices. The first being what later became the single artwork for I Guess, Anyway, and another that was taken during the video shoot for the same track.
I also knew that I wanted to have the title in my own handwriting to reflect the personal, homemade nature of the record. I created this by scribbling the title on a notepad, taking a picture of it with the webcam on my iMac and converting it to a vector file. I also added a texture to make it look slightly distressed.
I tried various placements of my artist name and the album title, many of which didn’t work. At first, I kept concentrating on putting my name in massive font, but there was something off.
Stuck on this section of the artwork, I decided to concentrate my attention on the back cover, which would hopefully be much easier as I’d finalised the photo I wanted to use.
However, I quickly encountered another problem - making the front and back fade nicely into the spine so that everything looked fairly cohesive.
Whilst experimenting with colours, filters and edits of the images, I landed upon what would become the final back cover photo.
Suddenly I could see it all falling into place. The colour scheme would be black and pink. I made the same edits to both front cover options, and one just looked ‘right’. I removed the Leonardo Hotel in the background to create space, and experimented with making the album title the part with the massive font instead.
Eventually, I finished the final design.
The back cover also included another essential - the album’s barcode, which would ensure its chart eligibility amongst other things.
Armed with a theme for the rest of the artwork, I set about creating the vinyl labels, AKA the circular bits in the middle of a record.
I hadn’t been able to create them out of holographic material, so I decided to do the next best thing and use a picture of the shiniest dress I own as the background. I looked at records in my personal collection to see the information that needed to be included on this section, as frankly I had no idea.
Last, but very not least, came the booklet. I had to make four separate PDF templates, each containing two pages. I wanted to illustrate the booklet - slightly nicked from every damon albarn-involved album booklet I’d ever flicked through - with scans from the pages of my notepad. The initial lyrics I’d drafted and the doodles I’d drawn when stuck for ideas or thinking of the next line. I also chose some of my favourite unused photographs to place alongside the lyrics. I wanted the whole thing to look a bit like a scrapbook, so I put some selotape on my printer and scanned it, then used the images that gave me to give the impression I’d stuck the photographs into the booklet by hand.
By far the hardest part of the whole process was writing the big thank you speech at the end of the booklet. I was so drained by that point and juggling so many plates that it was hard to find the mental capacity to write something so incredibly important and make sure I remembered as many people as possible and the roles they played during the creation process.
But somehow, I managed to do it, and sent the artwork off for approval in February.
The next stage was waiting to receive a test pressing of the album - an plain, artwork-less vinyl prototype of the finished product to confirm that all tracks were in the right order and there were no glaring sound issues.*
This is where I hit a slight snag. I only own one record player, which is part of hi-fi containing a cassette player, CD player, radio and record player. It’s not the world’s best quality, but we had one of those hi-fis when I was a kid and I always wanted to get one of my own so I could play things in any format I wanted from the same machine. I must confess I don’t do things like cleaning and replacing the needle, for example, so when I played the vinyl it sounded as though everything was warped. I relayed this information back to Breed Media, who listened to the record at their end on a much better record player and sent me over a direct recording from it. It sounded normal, which was a huge relief.
I was then able to finalise everything and give Breed Media the OK to start manufacturing the vinyl.
During the first week of July, 275 (an extra 10% free on top of my order of 250) vinyls arrived at my house, and on 1st September they started making their way to you. Or, perhaps, they haven’t made their way to you yet (here’s the link if you’d like to change that!)
I’m so proud of the finished product, and it’s truly beautiful to see pictures of my album on your turntables.
There will also be opportunities throughout the rest of 2023 and 2024 to pick up a vinyl and perhaps get it signed by me in person. Look out for full details soon!
*this is a great moment to mention that I’m currently holding a raffle over on my Bandcamp page to own the final test pressing - signed - for just £5. More details here!
I hope you enjoyed this insight into the process - thank you as always for reading and supporting,
emzae x