David Lang

love fail

Cantaloupe Music, 2014

Tristan & Isold & love

I was excited to work on David Lang’s follow-up release to death speaks. Entitled love fail, I was already planning a design from same aesthetic universe in my mind.

love fail explores the almost 1000-year-old story of the lovers Tristan and Isolde. In his liner notes, David Lang writes: ‘the love of Tristan and Isolde begins by accident—they drink a love potion. They didn’t mean to drink it, and they didn’t mean to fall in love. They drink and—BAM!—it starts. It is almost a laboratory experiment into what love might be like without any of the complications of how real love begins or works…’

For the songs, he combines historical texts about love, borrowed from many sources, alongside contemporary texts by Lydia Davies that describe the impossibility of relationships: ‘She knows she is right, but to say she is right is wrong, in this case. To be correct and say so is wrong, in certain cases.’

love fail is sung by a quartet of female voices (the famous and now disbanded Anonymous 4). The live performance of love fail is accompanied by a projected video work and David asked if I could use stills from the video for the cover. I tried but they didn’t work. Taken out of context, the stills made you focus too specifically on actors’ faces and costume details.

I reasoned, though, that if the work had a strong visual component then it was only fair that it was a part of the CD design. But after my attempt to make them work as a strip inside the wallet, David decided that he didn’t want video stills in the design at all, he found it too forced. He offered me instead the ultimate brief: ‘you should forget everything and just follow your idea for the cover wherever it leads you’.

I set about finding an image of love that was universal and iconic. My focus was on finding a picture of a man and a woman kissing – a special challenge even for a seasoned picture scavenger like me. I trawled through hundreds of kissing couples in various states of passion that said nothing much about the impossibility of relationships until I found a photograph from 1908 entitled ‘Loves Reward’. The couple meet each other in a strangely static, passionless kiss, where their faces are unmoving masks even while their lips touch.

I didn’t want to show too much of the historical detail in the photo, but make the faces as timeless as possible, so I cropped in tightly. The other two images in the wallet unfolded the graphic narrative in a similar way to death speaks. This time though, the images inside the wallet were direct illustrations from the libretto: a vine wrapped around a branch, growing inseparable, and a wine glass of a modern variety representing the love potion that is both the couples’ joy and curse.