"Reality Bends" Album Art

I took the album cover image early one morning on Ainakahele Street in Hilo in 2002 when the rising sun came through the window to illuminate the cork sculpture that was on display in the living room. The light was natural for this picture which was not digitally rendered. Upton Ethelbah at Unity Design did the graphics for both of my albums.

This was a picture I took during "relief stop" on a trip through southern N.M., looking south toward the town of Animas, where I was heading to look at a field of chile peppers for my day job as a chile crop checker. 

There is a "men's-bush" at the lonesome turn-off from Interstate 10 and State Road 338 that looks out over Animas Playa, which will turn into a seasonal lake in the coming weeks before sinking back down under the desert sand for the dry season. It felt good to leave my water there, and the bush seemed grateful.

The summer monsoons had come bringing billowing barges of clouds from the Gulf of Baja to provide the first rains after nine months of dry desert air. You can see the rain falling out of the clouds on the right side of the picture. This is the most magical time of the year in the southwest U.S., and why New Mexico is called "The Land of Enchantment". This image was also straight from the camera, without any rendering. 

I took the picture on the back of the album while staying at a hostel in San Pedro la Laguna, on Lake Atitlan, in Guatemala during February of 1990. There was a civil war going on at that time and Americans were discouraged from going there. 

I was in language school in Quetzaltenango for several weeks, and had come here after not finding much affinity for Antigua, where most foreigners stayed and went to Spanish language school. This place was way out in the country in an Indigenous village.  

The picture was taken with a long exposure, about about 5-7 seconds as I recall, using a Minolta SLR 35mm camera and Kodachrome slide film, like the other pictures in this gallery. 

Upton Ethelbah, the graphist, conveniently placed the Pleides in the window. I started the title song to the album, Reality Bends (to meet the eye) in Antigua and Quetzaltenango, but finished the song while staying here in the room where this picture was taken. The title song has the line:  "In the Pleides, the rainbow ends".

A long-exposure picture on Kodachrome 35mm slide film lit with about 5-7 seconds of candlelight with the camera on a tripod.  The scene was on my bed in a guest hostel room in the village of San Pedro de Laguna on Lake Atitlan, Guatemala. (February, 1990)

This image was lifted from the album cover picture and tinted green to make the disk label graphic.