I worked for close to an hour cleaning up one fairly stout album cover (particularly for a European release) that did not look to be in too bad a shape despite having gone through Hurricane Katrina; but I couldn’t get all of the dirt off, and there was no way I could get an album in it once it dried.  I still decided to frame it, and it is on my wall today:  Lazy Ways, the second and last album by a British band called the Marine Girls, from the early 1980’s.  I don’t have another album in my collection quite like it:  three talented women singing their own songs, mostly together, whose voices don’t quite mesh, backed by acoustical guitars that seem to be just slightly out of sync – but the album is absolutely captivating.  One of the Girls, Tracey Thorn became the female half of one of my very favorite bands, Everything but the Girl; the male half, Ben Watt was the photographer for the album cover. 

 

(May 2010)