Edie Carey & Sarah Sample – Til’ The Morning: Lullabies & Songs of Comfort.

Edie Carey & Sarah Sample join forces to bring this gorgeous lullaby album to life. Their hauntingly beautiful harmonies create a soothing atmosphere for new parents and their little ones. The duo’s hushed lullabies are full of emotion that will swell your heart. Each song delivers a special kind of comfort and poignancy that matches the deeply tender expression between the maternal figure and her infant.

The alluring illustration was done by Caitlin Connolly, a Utah-based artist who explores the human experience, with an emphasis on women in different life phases. In this piece, Connolly exhibits thoughtful detail and subtle textures using curves and lines that, together, create an intimate scene and an intensity that is palpable.

In her personal statement, Connolly expresses:

“My work often explores the feminine experience as I attempt to understand myself and all women more fully and view them the way I see them – powerful yet flawed.”

When I first saw the album art, I was flooded with memories, recalling the potent range of emotions I felt as a new mother. However, after hearing Carey and Sample share their raw, personal experiences, I was compelled to look even further at Connolly’s design.

Sample explains,

“I have known Caitlin Connolly for many years and watched her art and drawings evolve over time. She seems to have settled into her artistry in a deep and beautiful way, often drawing women and life phases they are in. I had seen one of her drawings entitled “A Piece of Me” and was immediately struck by the beauty of the image of mother and baby.

The mother in the drawing is wearing a dress that is fractured into many small pieces. The baby is wrapped in her dress, and the mother is tenderly looking down into the face of her child. I identified with the mother in the drawing. I was living in Seattle when I had my first child six years ago, and the transition required to become a parent was rough to say the least. I was enamored with my beautiful baby, and yet I felt like I was falling apart at the same time. Caitlin’s image perfectly captured the fracturing I felt in my own life as a mother, and yet at the same time showed a mother’s love.’

Photograph by Ryan Tanner

Carey continues,

“When Sarah showed me Caitlin’s incredible work, I was immediately taken with it, and it just felt like the perfect image for the soothing, healing, intimate feeling of the record. The mother’s fractured dress spoke to me as it did Sarah of all the difficulty of breaking down the “you” you once were to remake yourself into a mother. It also reminded me of the struggle my husband and I went through to become parents. Infertility has been – and continues to be – the most difficult experience I’ve ever had – and while it brought with it feelings of being broken, it also has made me more grateful than I might have been otherwise to finally have gotten the chance to be a mother – and all the beauty and struggle that comes with that privilege. Caitlin seems to just understand and convey all the complexity of those feelings in her work.

 

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To read other posts related to the exploration kids’ album art, read the feature on Secret Agent 23 Skidoo’s Grammy nominated album The Perfect Quirk.