'33 1/3 Grand Street' After I had mastered the record, I was asked what I was thinking about the artwork for the record. I had some ideas about images and also what I didn't want. I was aware of that feeling I wanted to convey and also for a record from someone, who people may not have heard of, I wanted to get across some notion of what the music and I guess what I was about, for me there inexorably linked. So we decided that an image of me. more...

Some kind of image a photo perhaps, something with a melancholy air, but how to achieve that was still a mystery.I had started working with a textile designer, Helen James on the idea of using silk screen prints for the back of the record—where the list of songs would read, she wrote some of the lyrics of the songs like “America, song my mother taught me” etc.and picked some of the more iconic phrases and put them on a screen and then picked some Caravaggio images and the result was something that’s really subtle and really powerful. My friend Tom Le Goff—a photographer in New York arranged a photo-shoot with me-no brief (as they say) just some images –to see what we had. When I got there he said, “ Okay Mark, no holding a guitar or any props” “Shit”. So all the photo’s had this helpless quality to them, sorry I’m not making this up. I felt so exposed-so uncomfortable-this was the cover of my record and I hated it. At one point we stopped and I said “tom, just give me a minute here, okay, not really digging this” And he took one photo as I was kind of up-set, and it was the one when we got back the contact sheets that we loved. Which is kind of mental. There’s a whole thing about portrait shooting that was relived to me-about the camera angles and how by changing them, you infer a type of personality. My friend Paddy Glannon took the photo in the middle of the record. A true friend, I think you can see the fun we had, some images can revel that. I hope the darkness and almost the rusty nature of the cover is a true reflection of the record that is Grand Street

'Ghosts' While I was writing this record and then mastering there was a debate about the concept of the artwork and or the record As a record it deals with many different senses of loss and well, one of the songs is called Ghosts, I thought that might be a cool area to explore, with an image or something. It's amazing, it has to be said, that a lot of what happens within music and following on, what happens with the production and then artwork -is a kind of leap of faith, that a half idea, worked on, can turn into the finished idea. more...

So that's really the only idea I had, something kind of ghostly. And that's where it stayed until the record was due to come out. I was touring in North Carolina when I got a call saying that if we could find a way to do it, a friend of our's, Par Font, from Norway could maybe help us out. We would videoconference between Wilmington and Paris using a G-5 Mac and an I-sight and somehow take photo's. Then Par would take the images and paint onto them and then fed-ex them to us in New York. Madness...but it worked, so I posed for a guy who directed me from 5,000 miles away and by the time we got back to New York we had our image. A cool, distorted painted picture of me, someone asked how long I had to stay underwater while the picture was taken!!! Job done. We kept everything else black and white used another of Par 's pictures on the back. And out came the ghosts.

'Attic Faith' I had worked with Dutch photographer Luc de Nijs many years ago in Ireland. We met again by chance when I moved to Amsterdam and we became good friends, working together on several shoots and film projects. We chose to shoot the album cover in Amsterdam as it is the city that connects me to most of the songs on Attic Faith. I had a room in an attic near the Oosterpark for about 4 years and most of the songs were written there.We set out early on a winter morning to catch the mist still lying over the city. We had decided from the start on a black and white portrait cover. more...

We wanted to capture images of myself in the city but not in the ‘reality’ of the city. We had experimented with plastic sheets between camera and subject in a studio setting but the results were varied. However we both felt that if we could capture the morning mist then we would really have the mood and effect we wanted. We used our bikes to move from location to location, carrying all the equiptment and working as fast as possible. Luc used a Hasselblad and chose 6x6 format Agfa black & white slide film, a film he loves for it’s many gray tones. The front cover portrait was shot in the Oosterpark, as was the ‘blowing in the hands’ photo. The portrait on the inside panel was shot from outside the attic room with the apartments opposite reflected in the window. We chose to keep the lyric booklet simple and the text easy to read. The colour and the layout of the song titles on the back cover are my personal nod to Van Morisson’s ‘Veedon Fleece’. The album was launched as a limited edition digipak and later versions were condensed to booklet form.