“What If Everyone Got What They Wanted?” is the Hepburns’ paeon to letting it all slip through your fingers: “I turned to discover you’d vanished into the thin air…Your molecules sucked up by the air conditioning. Now we’re all passive smokers, unwittingly breathing you in.”
Linear A is one of two scripts used in ancient Crete and has yet to be deciphered. Our eyes, however, routinely decipher the abstract mesh of halftone dots which combine to represent photographic images on the printing press. Substituting oversize patterns of lines (straight and wavy) for the tiny dots calls attention to this process.
The treatment is CMYK primitive: the cyan layer uses an oversize, wavy halftone. The magenta uses straight lines. The moiré happens in the water. Of course, the printer saw this and thought there was something wrong with the films.
The fisherman gets two treatments: a wavy halftone for his net, a simple high contrast for everything else.
The back of the package features the first appearance of the cat. And a revisionist view of the Champagne Reception artwork. Actually, this was an early design for the Champagne cover which got scrapped in favor of a more cartoonish illustration which I thought more in line with the rest of the Champagne package. I’ve regretted it ever since…
Lyrical references (“the ocean would be such a dull place if all of the fish had been caught”) aside, the aquarium scene here and the tropical fish on the labels (and the fisherman with his net, for that matter) are, of course, in homage to the classic The Magic of the Hepburns LP from 1988.
Side one: one fish, one song.
Side two: two fish, two songs.
Of course the 3" CD has three of everything.
