How this soft, silky slice of faux-80’s soul-inflected disco pop missed the Hot 100 is a mystery to me–like the appeal of so many artists who do inhabit the upper reaches of said singles chart.
The video is a hoot too. In an Instagram post Mayer joked: “I needed to make a video for ‘New Light’ but nobody could agree on a budget, so I went to a place downtown and made this with a company that usually does birthday and Bar Mitzvah videos.”
This eighteen minute documentary takes you inside the work of David A. Smith, an English artist who specializes in “high-quality ornamental hand-crafted reverse glass signs and decorative silvered and gilded mirrors.” (Got that? You may want to read that last part again.) In something of a departure from earlier projects, Smith designed an ornate “turn-of-the-century, trade-card styled album cover” for John Mayer’s album Born &Raised. His work is meticulous and exacting. And this “Behind The Scenes” film, complete with commentary from Mayer and Smith, captures the artist’s process in loving detail. Now please sit back and enjoy.
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The music of Mayer’s album is a perfect match for the art of Mr. Smith, and makes a great soundtrack for the film depicting his antiquated craft. If Mayer is smart he’ll keep this artisan on retainer and give all his future albums an unmistakable trademark style, as Yes did with Roger Dean and the Moody Blues with Phil Travers. That said I hope the job pays well; I can’t imagine many album covers have required more hours of painstaking work than this one did.