The following is excerpted from a newspaper article in the February 8, 2004 edition of The News-Star, Monroe, LA. It’s an interview with me about the “In Bright Mansions” CD package and the Grammy nomination I received for this project.

While the rest of us are rooting for our favorite artist to win a Grammy, Jim McAnally will watch for a win.

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McAnally, who earned his master’s in fine arts from Louisiana Tech University in 1992, is nominated for Best Recording Package. He designed the enhanced CD “In Bright Mansions” – a recording by the Fisk Jubilee Singers of Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn.

“I’m a visual artist, so I never even expected to receive this nomination,” McAnally said of his first experience with the Grammys. “It was a wonderful surprise, and I feel greatly honored.”

You won’t see McAnally in the audience when the camera pans over the crowd. “I thought about attending it but decided against it since I had such short notice to make travel arrangements,” he said. An adjunct professor at Watkins College of Art and Design, the Nashville native had a plateful in designing this particular enhanced CD, which looks like an old 78-RPM record.

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“Well, if you read through the CD ‘book’ you’ll see that this project covered many areas,” he said. “Obviously, it is an audio CD, but they wanted it to be more than just that. They wanted it to be an historical overview of the Jubilee Singers and a documentary on the recording and production of the current troupe of singers, with notes by the producer, engineer and choral director.”

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So, McAnally had to present these unconnected pieces of content in a unified way, blending contemporary, technical information and historical data. “Well, as part of my research into the Jubilee Singers – in order to present them accurately, I needed to know as much as possible about them and their history – I was given access to the Jubilee Singers’ archives in the Fisk University library,” he explained.

In the library, McAnally discovered many appealing items, including old broadside posters announcing the group’s concerts, old concert programs, newspaper articles and reviews and miscellaneous ephemera. “The most intriguing items in the archive were several old scrapbooks that someone had lovingly put together who was either a fan, a family member or possibly even a member of the Jubilee Singers themselves,” McAnally said. “So, that sparked an idea.”

An inside spread

The art designer employed a scrapbook motif to present the various items on the CD. “Well, I couldn’t have an old-looking scrapbook with a shiny silver CD. It would break the illusion I was trying to create with my design theme,” he explained.

Compact disc art

“As part of my research I had purchased several old 78 RPM records of the Jubilee Singers, dating back to the 1920s on eBay. So, I decided to make the CD look like an old 78 record, thus keeping the antique feel of the packaging,” McAnally said. The enhanced CD was designed to keep the visual theme of the CD packaging, but it had to take advantage of the technological aspects of interactivity, he said.”So the ‘buttons’ were made to look like typographic ornaments commonly used on old letterpresses like those seen on some of the broadside posters I’d come across,” McAnally said.

@2004 The News-Star