It was time to do something different. Something a little bit less stressful and incessantly pounding on the soul. Don't get me wrong... I LOVE creating the big frenetic tentpoles I've written that "go to 11," but it really was time to do something different. If for no other reason than that my ears simply needed a break: it takes literally hundreds, if not thousands, of listens to a track to write, record, mix, and prep it for release. Those bangers heard so many times have a way of making your ears ring. And besides, Dune: Part Two hit theaters in March of 2024, just prior to the release of this track, so me mixing it up with sandworms and Paul-Muad'Dib seems kind of fitting here (also, I learned the word "susurrus" reading Dune in the late 1970s, which I used as a title for the sixth track on my Twist of 8 album, so the influence from Frank Herbert's stellar sci-fi novel Dune predates this track by several years, and several songs).

To match the low-key vibe of the song, I wanted to try a monochromatic look. I didn't want black and white (true monochrome, right?), but I wanted to use a limited pallette, and maybe just a single color. The song is called Shifting Sands, yeah? So how about HOT PINK?!?!?! Kidding! I decided to use a sand-based colorway. That made sense, especially considering the Dune angle in all of this.

I had a few ideas in mind about cover art for the track, one of which was to shoot a picture of my own hand piled up with sand (spice?...) sifting through my fingers. But the song isn't called SIFTING Sands, and I don't have any sand readily available to me (besides, I was working in a limited timeframe!). I do have real sand near me: on California beaches! But I wanted a more earthy sand color than could be had in Malibu. So, next stop? The interwebs...

A short time ago, a friend turned me on to a site called Unsplash that offers free use of their huge catalog of photography and art. They ask you to attribute ownership, which seems like a minimum ask, and easy to do. I've used Unsplash photos on a few other covers, and always give credit where credit is due, and I do that here as well with Desert Under White Sky During Daytime by tog Wolfgang Hasselmann, whom I found in the coffers of Unsplash with a simple search of "sand."

Here's a downsized version of Wolfgang's original picture that I used to create the cover art for Shifting Sands:

I loved the almost Martian-looking landscape and haze in that shot, and the red in the sand color only emphasize that feel.

I tend to use a fair amount of symmetry in my work (thanks to my early influence from the works of Victor Vasarely and M.C. Escher), so I had my way with Wolfgang's many-times-downloaded photograph (going on 170,000 downloads from Unsplash as of April, 2024!), squaring it, flipping and mirroring it, and adding a final touch via one of my orbs in a golden hue to the very center of the image. In the end, Wolfgang's shot is the clear impetus for the entire work (couldn't have been done without it!), but I successfully moved it fairly far afield from where it started to get to the final cover art. And there was no AI involved at all! That's a win!!

THE FINAL: