Bell's album cover artwork rings true with Juno voters
Three-time nominee gets psychedelic with longtime collaborators Whitehorse
Lyle Bell, one of Edmonton's true renaissance artists, is up for his third Juno Saturday — this time for his psychedelic album cover for Whitehorse's Strike Me Down, where he hand-built and shot a trippy set for musicians Luke Doucet and Melissa Mcclelland to sing in, then tear to shreds.
It's Bell's second Album Artwork of the Year nod at the national awards ceremony, with the innovative local photographer nominated last year as part of the artwork team for July Talk's Pray for It, which later took home 2021's Alternative Album of the Year. Shout Out Out Out Out Out, one of Bell's numerous longtime musical collaborations, was also Juno-nominated for Alternative Album of the Year back in 2007.
While this year's nomination is the first to bear Bell's name alone, he's quick to note the Six Shooter Records' Artsquad team — including polymath Caitlin Veitch — helped a lot with the construction and execution.
“I could have just done it all in Photoshop,” Bell explains of the physical-world effort for the shoot. “But for Apple Music and Spotify, I wanted a seamless loop where you would see they're clearly playing inside this set piece. So something not fake-able.”
The rainbow archway set and overall vibe found inspiration everywhere, from the famous Sgt. Peppers' set to Dr. Seuss to the legendary Hipgnosis, the U.K. design group behind some of the most celebrated album covers in history, including Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy and Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here.
Over three cold winter days in the depths of the pandemic, Bell, who's been Six Shooter's full-time multimedia artist-in-residence since 2020, flew to Hamilton and converted a garage into a whitewall photo studio, actually mining the visuals for three days for three albums — Modern Love, Strike Me Down and an as-yet-to-be released Whitehorse country record.
This sort of crushing schedule is part of the deal that allows Bell to stay in Edmonton working for a Toronto record label.
“I love it here,” he notes. “My dad just died and I'm trying to help my mom, and we own a house.
“To get what we have in Toronto would be impossible.”
On set, the 50-year-old Bell shot digital images with a Nikon Z6, black-and-white film stills with his trademark Pentax 67, used a Gopro for behind-the-scenes time lapses, and shot 16mm film footage on his latest obsession, a Krasnogorsk-3 — the so-called Russian Bolex.
“It's so fun to shoot, knowing that you've got three minutes of film and it's basically going to cost you $200,” he says like a proud papa.
Bell's design work for Six Shooter, meanwhile, has roots reaching back to the '90s making ads for the since-evaporated Vue Weekly, then some of the finest screen-printed gig posters this city has ever seen.
He has also known and worked with Mcclellan and Doucet for years.
“You can't just trust anyone to throw balloons at your face for eight hours,” says Doucet. “We've known Lyle for almost as long as we've known each other. He got involved when we were making the first Northern South record (2016) and very quickly he assumed a huge role in helping us figure out how to come across visually.
“With Lyle there's an esthetic kinship and a playful eye that makes it all seem less narcissistic,” Doucet adds.
“This album was modern pop so I wanted something that was super bright and colourful,” Bell explains. “I used prisms to shoot them and we shot a video of them smashing it as part of the art piece and part of the performance.”
Later shots of the pair have them sitting in the sparkly aftermath, and there's an intentional thematic thread running through these images and those for Modern Love, which used a large balloon (with darts thrown at it) to represent the fragility of relationships.
As with a lot of Bell's work — including as singer and earworm songwriter for the Wet Secrets and Whitey Houston — there's always thought and reliably recurring gallows humour involved.
With Six Shooter, as well as bringing a focused creativity to something as simple as staff photos or web pointers, he's done a wide array of multimedia work for July Talk, The Dead South, and even animations for Tanya Tagaq. New deadlines are always popping up.
“There's something about that added pressure, which can sometimes be great, where you just have no choice but to blast forward, and the solution presents itself as soon as you're blasting at it,” he says. “It puts stress on my brain and my brain does not like stress. But I generally am able to figure it out.
“I mean, I can still come up with mundane ideas, and it's possible to fail. Sometimes you miss, and that sort of pressure is what actually makes me lose sleep,” he says with a moan. “It actually makes me do something that I call `sleep working,' where I'm half dreaming and half awake that I'm writing emails about how I'm about to be working.”
But he says this is the tiniest of downsides amid the alluring and inspiring creative hurricane.
As for what he'll wear at the Junos, he's still working on that but we can expect something wild and amazing.
“I haven't perfected it yet,” he says with a laugh. “That's the part of the thing that's still eating my brain.”