Abijah Zwiers
29 April 2025

Cover Art and Outwardness

What creating the cover art for “Turning;” taught me about creative collaboration

The way the cover art for “Turning;” was made is parallel in a lot of ways to the way the songs were. In the process of making the project, I wrote full songs, demos, and then recorded them the best that I could at home. But I couldn’t get certain things as good as I’d want just by recording alone at home. I needed to engage with other people in the creative process. So I had Justin play sax on some of the tracks. I had Grey over and we would just mess around, adding little vocal and instrumental parts and tweaking the arrangements. Then I took the whole project with Crispin and we tracked drums at Jonas’s studio, Port William Sound. I recorded many of the piano, bass, and guitar parts there too. A similar thing happened with the cover art. I made the original collage, and sent it over to Cam.

Here’s what the physical thing looks like:

We workshopped a bunch of different ideas after that. Most of them didn’t even use the collage. We were just aiming to try different things to see what resonated most with the project.

Here are a few of those initial concepts:

We found some things that we were aesthetically drawn to independent of the content — dithering and collages that still morph together as though they’re one scene — and ran with those. We had the colour palette from the original collage and then I sent Cam some photos from my early childhood to incorporate:

These photos were taken in Scotland when my family lived in the UK for 3 months when I was 2 years old.

We also came up with the “TURNING” word logo, which is four-branched with a cross in the middle:

Cam added all these elements digitally into the collage. He replaced the boy in the original collage with a cutout of the photo of me. He also borrowed a couple elements from the idea stage. After some back and forth iteration we arrived at the final cover art for “Turning;”:

I likened this process to that of the music (and will soon to the content of the project, too) because it involves the same type of surrender and outwardness. Allowing another voice into a creative work is difficult for fear of losing or diminishing your own in the process.

In the same way that I recognize that Crispin is an excellent drummer who understands what parts will sound best in a song far better than I do, Cam is an incredible graphic designer whose understanding of composition and digital textures and colour theory exceeds mine. If in either case it was a matter of pure technical ability, that surrender would be effortless. But there’s also a part of Crispin’s personality the comes through in his playing. Grey’s personality and musical background show in the creative decisions and parts that they contributed to the EP. Justin’s melodic and tonal vocabulary on the sax is uniquely his own. Cam’s visual decisions carry his personal stylistic character with them. In each case, the personality of all of these friends who contributed to the project is infused inextricably into the aesthetics of the project.

Through these collaborations, the project ceases to be completely my own. And I’m required to have an outward disposition to accept this. To realize that it’s actually enriching rather than detracting to have creative voices that are not my own in my art is an acceptance that the project is ultimately not my own. In fact it is made more whole out of the plurality of collaboration.

These ideas are much the same as the ones at the conceptual core of “Turning;”. From unmoving to directional, not as a result of some inward force but instead an external power. I do think the project is summed up in the line from “Over + Over” which says “It’s hard to turn it while you’re in it”. It’s scary to give up the sense of control on your own life, but ultimately we live with inertia and directionality which are both much more easily changed from the outside. My life then also ceases to be fully my own in the same way that the creative work (a microcosm of my life at large) is.

An inward focus nearly guarantees apathy, but the outward disposition is both fed by and results in delight.

I’d like to write more about these ideas later. Maybe I’ll make this a series. Thank you for your time and attention in reading this and I hope you enjoy the music once it’s out.