How We Find a Release's Visuals Inside the Lyrics

Before we open a reference board for a new release, we print the lyrics. One page, wide margins, a pen.

Most visual ideas for a first single start outside the song: a photo someone saved, a color everyone is using this year, a cover from another artist. They can look good and still say nothing about this song.

The lyrics are the one place where the song has already chosen its own images. They only need to be found.

How we read them

We underline only what you could photograph. A kitchen, a red car, a window at night, wet shoes, a phone face down on a table. Things you could point at. A first pass usually gives ten or fifteen.

We cross out the feelings. Love, pain, freedom, forever. They matter in the song, but a camera can’t find them. A cover that tries to show “freedom” usually ends up as someone with open arms on a hill.

We look for what comes back. An object that appears twice, or sits in the chorus, or in the line people will sing along to. That one tends to win.

We keep one and write down why. “The kitchen light, because the whole song happens at home at three in the morning.” If the reason is hard to say in one sentence, we go back to the list.

The song already picked its images. Our job is to notice which one.

What we throw away

Most of the list. That is the point of the exercise. Ten good objects on one cover make a collage, and a collage on a phone reads as noise.

We also drop the most literal option when it has turned into a cliché. If the song is about the sea, a photo of the sea is the first idea anyone has. The better image is often right next to it in the lyrics: sand on the car floor, a towel drying on a chair.

Sometimes the lyrics don’t help at all. The song is instrumental, or the words are abstract on purpose. Then we do the same exercise with the title, or with one sound in the track people will remember, and ask what it would look like.

Where the image goes next

Once the object is chosen, it is more than a cover idea. It shows up in the teaser, in the first photo of the campaign, in a detail of the press photo, in a Story the week before release.

Nobody has to spot the connection. They just feel that every piece belongs to the same song.

It works like writing one sentence about the song: one small decision made early, so everything that comes after has something to be checked against.

The first thing to do

Print the lyrics of the song you are releasing next, underline everything you could photograph and circle the one thing that comes back. Bring that page to whoever is making your cover, even if that person is you.

If a release is coming up and you want help turning that page into a cover, teasers and a plan, that is the work we do.