– The Story of the Album Cover
When an image is still searching for its form
As is often the case when a project comes to life, unexpected events force you to stay flexible — and sometimes even ideas come to a halt before they ever see the light of day.
And the album cover followed the same path.
When we began thinking about recording an album during the Covid period, I very early on imagined its visual world.
But at that time, nothing was set yet: neither how we would record the songs we were already sometimes performing live, nor which musicians would be involved, nor even the exact direction the album would take. So the cover kept changing as well.
And yet, every time, I was convinced it was THE cover.
A cover has to reflect the music it accompanies. But as long as I couldn’t fully hear the soul of Talisman, something remained unclear.
The moment Talisman became blue
Then came the first mixes from John Shamir.
I remember that moment very clearly. I was deeply moved. The music was luminous.
It had a colour.
And that colour was blue.
From that point on, one certainty emerged: Talisman had to be blue.
But none of my visual ideas felt quite right. They were interesting, but something essential was missing — that spark that makes an image truly alive.
At first, I still appeared on the cover: with a hat, slightly steampunk-inspired.
Then a profile portrait, looking at the sky.
Then, little by little, only the hat remained.
And then… nothing.
The vision of the blue sapphire
Until that night.
In that strange state between sleep and wakefulness, I saw a deep blue sapphire appear in front of me.
It seemed to come from the depths of the universe, moving slowly, silently, almost weightless.
I woke up with a simple certainty:
“This is my cover.”
I later made a few experiments with AI, just to explore the idea visually. But very quickly, I understood it was not the right direction.
Talisman is an analog album, made with real voices, real musicians, real instruments. It needed an image carrying the same truth.
The meeting between music and painting
And then one name became obvious: Regine Blot.
Regine is a friend and an extraordinary painter. During our next lunch, I told her about this vision — the blue, the sapphire, this almost cosmic feeling that is difficult to put into words.
She immediately agreed.
What I love about her is her openness and curiosity. She usually works with a wide range of colours, but this time she chose to focus almost entirely on blue.
Very quickly, she transformed this intuition into an image — not a literal sapphire, but something closer to a talisman: less a precious stone than an object charged with energy, almost alive.
An image turned into a talisman
And for me, this is exactly what this cover is:
the birth of an intuition,
the search for a visual identity for this music,
the refusal of the “easy” option with AI,
and the encounter between music and painting.
The original artwork is in A2 format. It may one day become a poster in the merchandise collection.
Signed by Regine, of course 🙂
