Tom Caruana made this killer mixtape of Wu-Tang vocals and Beatles-related instrumentals and has just released it for free online here. I made the official album cover as seen above. Even if I wasn't involved I feel like I'd be recommending this to friends, it's just that good. The samples especially really run the gamut from expected to totally-far-out-"what was that?"-style-awesome. Reception has been pretty good so far, Raekwon put the link out on twitter and it really started blowing up! Looking forward to doing more stuff like this.

So I want to take back something I said in Part 1 -- "almost all of the Wu-Tang album art was horrible" is a bit too harsh I think. Some people have really run with that and gotten quite upset, and rightfully so. There are definitely some good ones in there. I've thought about it and I think it would be more accurate to say that my real problem with the original covers was how disjointed they all looked when put in the same playlist. The cleverest thing the Wu-Tang Clan ever did was negotiate separate contracts for everybody, but since these came out on so many different labels the cover art varies drastically. The "Wu-Note Project" is my attempt to amend this all the covers work as a set.

Let me know what you guys think of Part 2, either in the comments here or on Flickr, where I'm posting each as they're made. All in all I'm pretty happy with them, although I wish there was a Killa Bees Volume 2 fit into this series chronologically so I could do that Thelonius Monk yellow/red trick.

A little while ago I put a bunch of Wu-Tang (both group and solo) albums on my computer. 21 of them, in fact. I inherited some mild OCD from my mom, and as anyone who has seen my iTunes can attest to, it manifests itself in weird ways. I need to have decent-quality album art for every album on my computer, which currently equals over 90 gigs. The problem was that almost all of the Wu-Tang album art was horrible (ODB's two albums being the only real exceptions) -- no offense to the original designers, but as iconic as they might be they're looking pretty dated these days. So, armed with inspiration from what Olly Moss and others are doing (as written about by me here, and later by Kottke here) and a book of Blue Note Records covers, I set out to remake all 21. The first seven are here (click for full-view):

I've changed the art for these in my iTunes and love the results:

So seven down, fourteen to go. From here on out I'm going to start uploading them to my Flickr Photostream as soon as each is done, so you guys can bug me if I'm not making them fast enough. I'll post the next set of seven here when they're done. In the meantime, enjoy, and let me know if you have any comments or suggestions.