Tori Amos / Little Earthquakes: CD versus LP cover art

OK, now that I have it, the new vinyl is rather poor looking. The original vinyl looks noticeably sharper + the colours were richer. This new print looks ever so fuzzy with a gray-ish overlay. Really a pity. Same goes for the CDs by the way. So very poor quality printing there and truly boring selection of images.

“There are even Grammys for packaging FFS!”

I could have said that. But my FFS probably wouldn’t have carried quite the same inflection the same as yours….

The image on the CD was always meant to be larger by scale. It’s actually the same size as the image on the elpee. The image was always meant to be the same size regardless of the media.
Cheers.
Mark.

Correction: the square lyric pics and square Tori pics don’t appear on the inner sleeve. Apparently, the LP didn’t come with a designed inner sleeve. Instead, there are 16 square pics on the back of the sleeve. This also explains Dr Avalanche’s comment that ‘the original album did not have them [mushrooms] on the back cover’. He’s referring to the LP as the ‘original’ – when in reality the LP was a ‘speciality’ item back in 1992 for this release. Was a vinyl even released in the US – discogs.com doesn’t have it.

What will the back sleeve look like on this new edition? The pics above don’t show it. Maybe with all the tracks, there’s no space for mushrooms or any imagery.

There are eighteen (18) different versions of the “Little Earthquakes” CD on discogs.com and not one has the Tori-in-a-box image scaled down, as shown in the 2nd pic from top. Cassette and MiniDisc likewise. This site usually manages to address the correct points – and I’m grateful for all the work they do – but here they’ve missed it. Like many others have already pointed out, CD was the main format in 1992 and they didn’t just carelessly ‘derive’ the CD art from the LP design. The image on the CD cover was intentionally proportionally bigger on the CD cover and it wasn’t a design flaw.

The whole design was carefully laid out, on both LP and CD. On CD booklet, all individual lyrics are laid out in the form of a perfect square, one square per page. All images are the same size. On the LP inner sleeve, there squares are collected, 16 on both sides of the sleeve.

I don’t own the LP, but could it be that the sizes of the Tori-in-a-box images and the album title are actually the same, in reality? On CD, there’s just obviously a lot less of the white filler. The canvas size varies but the pics stay the same?

The original artwork for the original LP had the small artwork and I’ve never seen a CD with the small artwork, so the reissues look exactly the same as the original issues in that regard. One should remember that vinyl was all but dead by that time and that CDs and cassettes were the standard formats at the time. There may or may not be some “in joke” about the box staying about the same size on the vinyl as the pic on the CD, being Tori admitted somewhere that they thought it was funny to have a small box on the front of the CD cover and the big uhm… mushrooms on the back. Either way, if anything, the LP vinyl version therefore would seem to be the “revised” artwork, not the CD or cassette.

“Oh how I bow to thee Mr Knowitall Saint Paul of SuperDeluxeEdition and kiss thy sweaty feet” (NOT even if I was paid)! LOL

What they’re doing with the cover of Little Earthquakes is the same thing they did for the CD versions of ‘A night at the opera’. Only the japanese paper sleeve CD of the Queen album bears the original Lp artwork (with a lot of white and a tiny drawing in the middle).

And they also zoomed in the sleeves of George Harrison’s “Somewhere in England” (the first cd version) and Joe Jackson’s “Look sharp”.
So halas it is common to blow up artworks (or fonts) when they do a cd version of an Lp. :(

I’m curious about the sound quality of the b-sides. Some of those UK singles are at a very low volume. Happy to have these releases, but really wish we could get Y Kant Tori Read and some of the other outtakes.

Personally I’m excited to see they’ll be gatefold reissues. That’s why the Diana Ross reissues were so disappointing and the Lisa Stansfield and Donna Summer ones were so exciting. Of course its about the music but when time is taken with the packaging and it looks like a brand new edition (which these Tori Amos ones do), well then my wallet opens. Not a huge fan of Under The Pink, but Little Earthquakes? Absolutely. One of the best debuts I’ve ever heard.

I can’t believe Paul has to justify his posts to a rude person shouting and spurting out that crap about wars. Yes, you know, if you think that those things are more important, then why are you wasting your time on a site about music? Why are you wasting money on music? Surely you could do something so much more constructive like helping the needy! So go instead of insulting people’s intelligence.

I am very glad that Paul has taken time to explain the difference and question the layout. Let’s be honest, if you are here you care not only about the music. Music and the artwork has been an important match. Listening to music while looking at the artwork, reading the lyrics, is a wonderful way to listen to your favorite artist and enhance the whole musical experience. There are even Grammys for packaging FFS!

I think you should just go to iTunes and download the music there, unless you’re one of the others.

are actually all b-sides from that period on the second disc(s) or are songs beeing left out?

I had it on Cassette.Remember at that time it was CD and Cassette that were the most popular formats.I remember the cover image being big on the Cassette version.

I can’t say it bothers me. I love awesome packaging, but ultimately, it’s the music that matters!

I have to say I’ll only be buying if the quality of the recordings is significantly better than the originals (which I bought in period, having discovered Tori via her Me and A Gun CD single, bought in local record shop for 50p), and to be honest, they’re going to have to be pretty good, as the originals were very good quality as it was. Remember, this was ’92, CD was the dominant format, so all discs were already mastered for playback on that format anyway. As to the size of the box, it really doesn’t matter to me, CDs have never had the impact of a full size 12″ vinyl cover. We lost album covers being Art as soon as CDs took over, I have a number of 12″ and album covers on my walls as artwork, but no CDs, they just don’t have enough impact to make it worth it.

As always, these comments are all MHO!

Amazing the things people will get riled up about.

I am really enjoying the conversation about the artwork. No, it’s not the most important thing, but why does it have to be in order for us to talk about it? Topics like this are why I come to this site at least daily. I don’t know many people who care this much about physical music product, and I am thrilled to have discovered a community here that shares my interests.

Paul, please keep up the amazing work and meticulous attention to details great and small. The vast majority of us are capable of simply ignoring the posts we are not interested in.

“Any further insights on remastering/sound quality?”

Wrong forum. Head on over to the Steve Hoffman board for, I’m sure, endless talk about that. Another bunch of real “music” lovers there, don’t cha know…

No mushrooms, I’m afraid. :) The original album did not have them on the back cover; I don’t know about the inner sleeves.

East/West did most of the European pressings of the album in 1992, but there is a German vinyl pressing which has the green/orange Atlantic labels (according tot Discogs).

To me both artworks (CD + vinyl) look just fine and exactly as it was when the album came out originally.

The *really* important question is: what will be the size of those mushrooms on the flipside?! Will they have made those bigger too?! ;)

Paul, I really like your response to Francis “that’s what we do here”. Right on the money. We all are here because this stuff matters to us. No one ever said it is ” important ” in a save the world way. This is our passion and entertainment. In the words of the movie Meatballs: “lighten up Francis❗️)”

I’m much more bothered that the old “EastWest” label logo has been replaced by the Atlantic Records one, and the discs are now bearing the iconic Orange, Green & Red Atlantic design on them. Which just isn’t right……

And breathe!

Wow… Funny the conversations that will become heated.

Personally, I don’t see a problem with two different sets of artwork between CD and vinyl. That which looks great in 12″x12″ looks terrible when clipped down to less than a quarter of the size. That’s almost universal if you stop to think about it. Not many iconic images from the vinyl age looked nearly so impressive when compressed for the digital one.

So, if they kept the CD artwork as it was originally released (on CD), aside from being the only version I’ve known, it really just seems like a natural choice to me. Now, if they took the blown up CD version and used that for a vinyl re-release or refused to use the vinyl art for a larger form “super deluxe” box version of the release, that would bother me, but on a double digipack I’m not sure I see a reason for a fuss.

It’s nice to get a good looking package when I buy music, but anyone not in it for the music should give up collecting CD’s and collect art instead.

Any further insights on remastering/sound quality? I already have almost all the singles, which aren’t horrible-sounding by any means; so unless the sonics have been upgraded no need to buy these new editions. Thanks, Paul.

While Francis may be going a bit overboard, the point from his initial comment should be reiterated: if this (artwork) issue concerns you, or for that matter, if “holding the music in your hands” is an all-important matter for you, then MUSIC is not really your primary concern. Which is fine. But let’s be honest about it at least from time to time, eh?

And you, Francis, waste your time commenting on this trivial little forum that we love when you could clearly be off elsewhere saving the world. Shame on you.

And re Tori, these releases look really nice but I already have all the music on the original singles etc, and wish there was more unreleased material in the archives. I’d even take a proper release for the Y Kant Tori Read album, which I have several bootlegs of, and which I still have a soft spot for :-)

The 1992 CD version looks “right” to me as well, not only because as others have said that was the dominant format by then, but from a visual perspective the LP’s photo and text looks ridiculously small.

The case with Please was a bit different, as the LP was still the definitive format for a design in 1986 (and many original CDs from that era had horribly modified versions of the sleeve artwork..Scoundrel Days, Graceland, Parade…the list goes on).

Countries are at war, homes are being bombed, people are dying from lack of food and water, murders have taken place and you lot go on about some artwork. Unbelievable!

Paul,
You mentioned that the above CD artwork was similar to the ‘revised’ CD – I must have an original pressing on CD then as my booklet looks like the vinyl art that you show. The photo on my copy is quite small – especially for a CD booklet!

There are more devastating things happening in the world to worry about some artwork on a CD or LP.

It is just an image – get a life and enjoy her music.

I could not care less about the CD packaging artwork, it is the music that matters to me (the original and the added). So her photograph is small on one format and large on the other, so what?

A Pitt tais gorgeois photograph is reduced to suce à small Scala ! The white frame is obviously too big. I guess the original artwork should have been revised by the same person who did it in 1992. I can’t remember i.e. there was a vinyl release at The time and if the photograph was bigger.

If they’d copied the LP cover but with it reduced down to CD size, the picture would be ridiculously small. As commented above, the album was released long after CD became the standard format for new releases, so I’d assume the CD version of the cover is the “correct” one, and the vinyl was just designed to keep the picture the same size and padded with whitespace.

I’ve got several other albums in my collection where the CD artwork is at the same scale as the vinyl artwork, but with spurious monocolor edges reduced – it’s the logical thing to do, surely?

Can you reach out to WB to find out the source lineage and cutting/mastering/pressing info for the two vinyl releases (specifically I’m interested in Earthquakes)?
Thank you Paul.

I thought Little Earthquakes came out when CDs were the regular format — so the CD would have the ‘proper’ cover. The Vinyl version would just have been a spin-off, where they couldn’t be bothered to ‘blow-up’ the image to 12″ size. At least, that’s what I thought … :)