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Want to make your family happy? Take them to the beach. So why does this beach have a buried Cadillac, empty lawn chairs, warm Coors, and a man staring at the ocean like he’s already lost the future? This album cover looks relaxed.
It isn’t. It was staged piece by piece on Santa Monica sand by Neil Young and designer Gary Burden at the exact moment success stopped working and grief caught up. Yet both named it as tehir favorite cover. Grab a copy and listen along with us. Questions, comments, recommendations? We’d love to hear from you at Albumartthecoverstories@gmail.com
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What does a medieval chess match with Death, a Bible verse about divine silence, and a pair of naked conjoined twins on a seesaw have to do with Van Halen? This album started life as The Seventh Seal—inspired by Bergman, Revelation, and Eddie Van Halen’s search for meaning—before becoming Balance, one of the band’s most unsettling and revealing statements. Glenn Wexler takes us inside the abandoned concepts, the androgynous child model, and the image that perfectly captured a band joined at the hip and pulling each other apart. Grab a copy and listen along with us. Questions, comments, recommendations? We’d love to hear from you at Albumartthecoverstories@gmail.com

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This album cover drops a deeply racist caricature into a quiet patch of woods and dares you to look away. It’s not playful. It’s not ironic. It’s a confrontation—one rooted in Victorian children’s books, minstrel imagery, and a slur that drifted from nursery rhyme to cultural wound. When billy woods resurrects the Golliwog, he isn’t reclaiming it—he’s freezing it in place and forcing us to reckon with what it has always been. The doll on this cover looks at you as you look at it. And it sees you. refuses to look away. This is a photograph that feels more like evidence than art and we have the story.Grab a copy and listen along with us as we trace the long, disturbing journey of the Golliwog—from toy store to public domain to abandoned railroad tracks—and unpack one of the most unsettling album covers of the last decade. Questions, comments, recommendations? We’d love to hear from you at Albumartthecoverstories@gmail.com
or check our Spotify Song List with a song from each album we’ve covered.