I sometimes get questions about this site. A few are below. If you have questions that I missed, please get in touch.
What are music cards?
Essentially, music cards are alternate, personal album art.
What they might lack in artistic skill they make up for with personal, charming and unique qualities. As a bonus, sometimes the drawings are good.
What is a music card?
At its heart, each music card is personalised album art.
This site contains music cards, featuring artists like Stephen Malkmus, Beyonce, Julien Baker and John Coltrane. A music card can be:
- silly, like a sketch of Stephen Malkmus attempting to use his self-titled album as a legally valid form of identification
- slyly, humourously existential, like my son's existential card featuring The Strokes' Is This It
- mildly skillful attempts to recreate album art, like New Order's Power Corruption and Lies
- conveyors of irredeemably bad jokes, like one about salad and Jon Hopkins' Singularity
...or more than one of those categories.
Why Music Cards are called that
In 2017, my son and I started creating these cards, drawing art for then-new albums that we were listening to. (Our first two music cards featured albums by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Wolf Parade. My son's and wife's favourite at the time was The Getaway; I was listening to Wolf Parade.)
There's more to the story, including why they're drawn on credit card-sized cards, plus the techncial details, but essentially we made a music-playing box out of a small computer, a card reader and the sort of cards you might use to unlock a hotel room door. Read how music cards began and how they work.
But that's not the heart of the site. The reason this site exists is here: all published music cards.
Why share these cards online?
For as long as I can remember, I've loved art associated with music, whether it's from a CD booklet, a cassette or LP insert, art on a 45 sleeve.
The best had additional art folded away inside, as a treat for fans that dug more into an album, like R.E.M.'s 1990 album Out of Time, Michael Jackson's 1982 album Thriller (baby tiger!) or Wilco's 1999 album Summerteeth, Shellac's 2024 album To All Trains is beautiful and, in one place, silly.
A photo insert from Steve Martin's album Wild and Crazy Guy is on display in my home and has the sort of goofy pun that we dream to achieve. (It may be hard to read in this photo but Martin has signed the photo "Best fishes, Steve Martin".):
Music Card drawings are often snapshots of music I listened to at certain times from the past several years, and often subtly weaving associations from my son's life (e.g., there's a series of cards related to music he listened to for motivation during his bottle-flipping phase) to things that are more recent (we adopted a cat in 2024, who's charming and is classified as an indoor cat).
Who runs this site?
Hi, I'm Matt. I'm a writer, editor and software developer in London.
I've written non-fiction and fiction for several publications, including The New York Times (eg these about secret rooms and an amazing art project, plus this brief, music-based piece that featured an interview with Brendan Canty of Fugazi), Washingtonian, McSweeney's (this is my favourite), Mississippi Review, Monkeybicycle, Denver Quarterly, The Morning News, and I've been fortunate to have some of the sillier things I've written in a few humour anthologies with far funnier people, like Steve Martin, Sarah Silverman, Andy Borowitz and Ian Frazier.
As far as software, I develop in Drupal and React, using PHP and JavaScript, primarily. I manage servers and traffic to and from them, have built some fun projects for Raspberry Pi-based systems, like a custom doorbell and clocks, plus the music cards project that my son and I worked on and which led to this site's existence.
What's the first concert you saw?
The Charlatans UK in 1992, Mississippi Nights in St Louis, Missouri. The mix was bad -- the Hammond organ steamrolled the other instruments -- but I loved it.
