Either/Or by Elliott Smith

The back cover of Either/Or, released on Kill Rock Stars, has always brought to mind the similarly stark image on Neil Young's Tonight's the Night. It's not a great leap, as both feature brilliant white subjects on jet black backgrounds. In both cases, that starkness is reflected in the music. As Pitchfork put it, "[a]chingly spare, these songs were hushed and intimate".

The album title was derived from the book of the same name by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, which as The Guardian noted, "deals with such themes as existential despair, dread, death and God. By this time, Smith's already-heavy drinking was now being compounded with use of anti-depressants."

As Scott Floman highlights, compared to his earlier releases, "this album is less about Smith's tough childhood and depencenies (drugs/booze), but despite some lighter moments most of the topics are still grim: feelings of emptiness, social anxiety issues, anger about the music industry, relationship woes... (“I hope you’re not waiting around for me, ‘cause I’m not going anywhere, obviously”). Yet so strong are the songs on this album that it leaves me feeling uplifted rather than depressed."
The back cover photo by Joanna Bolme's, a ex-girlfriend of Smith, at whose house some of the album's traks were recorded. The shot was later used by Kill Rock Stars as the front cover for a post-humous release of an alternate take of "Ballad of Big Nothing".

In reviewing the album for their top 100 albums of the1990s, Pitchfork wrote, "His elliptical lyricism and slithery song structures moved beyond the overwrought metaphors and folk regularity of his previous material to arrive at this logical, if unforeseen, conclusion."

All Night Long by Junior Kimbrough

"My songs, they have just the one chord, there's none of that fancy stuff you hear now, with lots of chords in one song. If I find another chord I leave it for another song." Junior Kimbrough

Despite the first set of commercially recordings from Junior Kimbrough being recorded in 1992, his story, and the back cover of that first album, echoed those of his 1930s forebears and their 1960s revivial. But he wasn't derivative. As his label - Fat Possum - points out, he was "an originator, Junior did more than build on certain tradition or perfect a certain style. Junior re-imagined the blues; he made a sound for himself."

His story was one of late recognition to a wider audience. Apparently a father of 36 children and son of a share-cropper, he recorded only sporadically through the 60s and 70s, with his first available recordings made when he was 62.

On his mediation on repitition in music, Mark Richardson identified what made Junior special: "Take a guy like Junior Kimbrough, vamping on one chord and playing what some people call "modal blues". Without chord changes, his songs move relentlessly forward, in parallel with his stories, the guitar spinning off on variations of which exist in relationship to the one chord's root note. When I first heard this sound, the blues all of a sudden sounded interesting again. But this was the paradox: it did so by becoming more repetitive, not less."

Like the early blues albums reissued in the 60s, the back cover was where you learned about the artist. In his wonderfully evocative liner notes to All Night Long, the album's producer Robert Palmer said that "you'll hear (Junior) sing something that sounds like a pre-blues field holler while he's playing a guitar rhythm like Memphis soul music, and when the bass and drums come in on one of Junior's riffs, the music might sound like some kind of hillbilly-metal-funk that hasn't been heard yet - except around Junior's place."

As Wes Freeman noted in his Perfect Sound Forever article, "'Junior's place' was an institution in the hill country of Northern Mississippi. Originally, it was his house. Kimbrough and his band, the Soul Blues Boys, would rehearse on Sunday afternoons and people just began showing up...Kimbrough's house has since burned down.

In the '70s Junior's place became a small wooden shack in the hills. In the early '90s, his reputation began to grow, first with his appearance in the documentary Deep Blues (1990) and then with the release of All Night Long, which received 4 out of 5 stars in Rolling Stone. Prior to recording All Night Long, Kimbrough moved his juke joint to an abandoned church, and there, his reputation was really made."

Presumably the building captured in the photograph on the back cover is one of 'Junior's Places'.