When Elise first asked me to create the album art for her newest and really huge project, We’re All Born Singing, I was thrilled and a little bit scared!  Elise is one of my personal hero’s and she has wholly transformed how I think about singing in my life and how singing is available to experience.  (Rather than just being on a stage, which was not fulfilling me the way that I hoped it would.)  What I wanted was a more spiritual, more honest connection with music and less making a spectacle of myself.  I am a songwriter to the bone, I write melodies every moment, especially now with a 5 month old to sing with.  But, what Elise does with music is so much larger than the kinds of concerts I was putting on before.  She sings with her audience and they sing with her, the audience transforming into instead just all kinds of people, singing together in harmonies, immediate and so present.  And she brought me to my great musical love, improvisational group singing.  As I am continually traveling with my life, often in unplanned directions these days, I can only hope that I can bring some of her light into my own life.

Elise Witt’s album art for We’re All Born Singing combines all of the things that are amazing about her into this big, huge musical statement.

Inviting and full of love, spanning such a large mass of space – tiny spaces with small sounds on Amoeba and a field recording of Song Deep In Your Bones in the huge outdoors!  In the last few weeks, I have awoken in the morning more than once with Song Deep in Your Bones running as a motivator for me to keep moving forward.  Tired and worn as I feel, I am at the same time filled with creative spirit and an eagerness to keep on, creating and creating and creating.

For this album art,  I collected a series of photographs of her most intimate personal spaces at her home.  I collaged them together to represent her poetry, in both literal and abstract ways.  I merged them with these really beautiful water pictures that photographer, Carol Burch-Brown took.  At her CD release show, we are thinking about making some art pieces from them to sell beautiful display pieces of her words and my images together.

Here are some pages from her album art, as well as some additional promotional pieces we made to showcase her work and upcoming concert.