Check out the evocative artwork behind some of Canada’s greatest tunes

By Sharon Arulnesan

While listening to your favourite song, have you ever glanced at its album cover and wondered what the connection between the song and the artwork could be?

Often seen as supplementary to the music itself, album artwork has a dual purpose: to captivate listeners and for the musician to tell a visual story of what their music represents.

Many album covers have stood the test of time and are still viewed as some of the most iconic album art of all time. Music listeners, even the most casual, are sure to recognize Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon’s simple, yet symbolic, glass prism featured on the album cover, or the controversial baby swimming towards a dollar bill on Nirvana’s Nevermind.

Canadian musicians are no strangers to experimenting with, at first glimpse, offbeat artwork—that actually has an individualized meaning to the musician. From rock to folk to psychedelic R&B, these Canadian album covers all have a fascinating story to share.

Clouds by Joni Mitchell

The Canadian folk singer Joni Mitchell has a career spanning decades of genre-shifting music, setting the stage for Canada’s alternative music scene.

The Clouds album artwork is a self-portrait of Mitchell— her first album to be a self-portrait. Mitchell is holding a prairie lily, the national flower of Saskatchewan, emblematic of her days growing up in the province.

The rich, orange-yellow sky in the artwork offers a parallel to “Chelsea Morning,” a track that is an ode to sunny mornings. Yet, as you move further down the artwork, darker colours emerge, blending themselves with Mitchell’s clothing. This sudden tonal shift could symbolize how the songs in Clouds also change into more solemn, meditative tunes. “Both Sides Now,” one of the more serious tracks of the album, is reflective of the sombre, lower-half of the artwork. The lyrics of the song ruminate on how the most joyous parts of life can also bring about the most gloom.

Fully Completely by The Tragically Hip

The explicit artwork featured on The Tragically Hip’s Fully Completely album cover could be a nod to the more progressive culture Canada adopted during the 1990s, with a massive explosion in popularity of the alternative rock genre.

The artwork for Fully Completely was done by Dutch artist Lieve Prins and was created on a Canon colour photocopier. It may seem like a simple process, but it was actually a bit more complex than it sounds; the collage is composed of the heads of the members of The Tragically Hip and two contorted, semi-topless women, surrounded by distorted objects such as coins, flowers and sea creatures. 

At first glance, the artwork seems like a mishmash of images, comparable to works produced during the rise of psychedelic artwork during the 1960s. However, the bizarre piece was intentional, as the songs in the album are just as puzzling, if not more. The songs are reminiscent of Canadian history, told through a stream of consciousness-style lyrics. The track “Looking for a Place to Happen,” deals with the European colonization of Canada, with a scathing reference to Jacques Cartier, a French explorer who was the first to navigate the St. Lawrence River.

Secret Path by Gord Downie

Gord Downie, lead singer of The Tragically Hip, never shied away from conceptual album artwork. Secret Path is no exception.

Based on the real-life story of Chanie Wenjack, a young Anishinaabe boy who died while trying to escape his residential school in Kenora, Ont., Secret Path aims to bring more awareness to the darker side of Canadian history and to ensure that stories like Chanie’s won’t be forgotten.

The album cover illustrates a winter scene, lined with a deep woodland, reflective of the climate when Chanie ran away from his residential school. The raven, although a symbol with differing meanings in different cultures, may allude to Chanie’s good sense of humour—in Northwest Indigenous culture, the raven symbolizes mischief and a trickster. 

The album served as inspiration for a graphic novel of the same name, detailing the life of Chanie and his escape from his residential school, featuring music from the Secret Path album and illustrations by Jeff Lemire. A film adaptation was also created, and it’s divided into ten chapters, with each chapter featuring a song from Downie’s album and illustrations by Lemire, working together to tell Chanie’s story.

Dawn FM by The Weeknd

The artistically ambiguous Dawn FM by The Weeknd is a more modern album that echoes themes of existentialism and mortality. The tracklist pairs nicely with an album cover that features a haunting yet fervent, aged portrait of the musician.

The artwork acts as a sneak peek into the lyrical contents of the album; the frequent motifs of death, and what it means to grow old. In the music video for the track “Gasoline,” the young version of The Weeknd is battering the old man-version of himself— perhaps emphasizing that we cannot run away from the inevitability of getting old no matter how hard we fight.

The cover could also represent the shift in The Weeknd’s discography: the gradual switch from party anthems dealing with sensual subject matters to a more mature, reflective tone in Dawn FM, illustrated by the elderly version of The Weeknd on the album cover.

Moving Pictures by Rush

Spanning around five decades of Toronto-based rock, Rush is only third behind The Beatles and The Rolling Stones for the most consecutive gold or platinum albums by a rock band. The artwork for Moving Pictures is just as awe-worthy as the band’s accomplishments.

A triple entendre of sorts, the red overalls-clad movers carrying paintings at first seems like an uncomplicated pun directed towards the title of the album: Moving Pictures. But, to the right, we see a group of people crying over how emotionally “moving” the paintings are. To add to the intricacy of the piece, on the back cover of the album there is a camera crew making a “moving picture” of the entire scene.

Even more mind-bending, the building in the background of the album cover is no other than the Ontario Legislative Building in Queen’s Park in Toronto, a possible nod to the band’s Canadian roots.

Next time you listen to your favourite Canadian track, pay special attention to the album artwork that accompanies it. You never know what hidden messages the musician is communicating to their listeners!