“My Name is Buddy” – 50th Grammy Awards Nominee

Artist Ry Cooder Brings Album Art to Life with the Help of DigitalFusion

DigitalFusion client, Ry Cooder's album "My Name Is Buddy" is a 50th Grammy Awards Nominee in the Best Contemporary Folk/Americana Album category. DigitalFusion played a key role in preparing the artwork for the album cover and an accompanying book.

Ry Cooder brought DigitalFusion the original hand drawings by artist Vincent Valdez. The drawings were carefully scanned, and the resulting images neutralized. They were then sharpened and finished under the direction of Ry's careful eye. Acheiving a delicate balancing between both sharpness and contrast within the careful line drawings with was of the utmost importance.

Excerpt from the Liner Notes

Not quite two years ago, Ry Cooder was knee-deep in some ninth-inning tinkering, finishing up his forthcoming album, Chavez Ravine, when a peculiar message sailed in - one could say - from deep out-of-left-field.

It arrived by way of U.S. Mail, slipped into a nondescript, manila envelope, addressed in an old friend's recognizable scrawl. Inside, he found a familiar image of the great bluesman, Leadbelly. Yet, photo-shopped in place of his face was that of a red cat; an inscrutable, seen-it-all expression hovering in his eyes. He found little else, except a web address and this note: "You'll know what to do with this."

But not right away. After some initial poking around to learn this red cat's name ("Buddy") and a bit of his vagabond story (he was found in the alley behind a record store in Vancouver, living in a suitcase, and he'd passed away in 2005), he pushed it aside to tie up pressing loose ends. But the notion had already crawled up inside somewhere deep in his imagination.

"Over time something was coming to me," he says. Propulsive rhythms and hardscrabble stories and scraps of ocher-toned melodies began to spin 'round inside. "I kept thinking 'red cat'... and I kept hearing an old Charlie Poole song - a cadence." It began to slide together. "He's a red cat - not just red colored - but he's a union man. He becomes Red." Next, a piece of lyric. 'I'm a red cat til I die...' " Soon enough, the itinerant Buddy had a back-story; some fellow travelers he meets along the road - Lefty the Mouse, the Reverend Tom Toad - a past and a future; a story to tell.

"'My Name Is Buddy': Another Record by Ry Cooder" is, in a certain respect, Ry Cooder circling back, revisiting a body of music that has for much of his life held a certain fascination. "When I first started doing records. I thought, 'I like these old songs. These dustbowl songs.' So I made a couple of records and people thought: 'What's this?' You can't sell this.' But I kept making these things, again and again, because I knew a good song," he says. "I'd say it's taken me 40 years to get it right."

If Chavez Ravine was Ry Cooder's musical palimpsest, his re-imagining of a lost neighborhood, a lost way of life, "My Name is Buddy" is the next chapter revisiting those themes of displacement, disenfranchisement, deteriorating democracy - but through the story of a band of friends, in the tradition of Walt Kelly's Pogo: "Pogo to me was a roadmap to life. Animals are perfect characters because they don't say much. They're beautiful metaphors. Very solid, not so hard to understand."

Part allegory, part picaresque adventure, the album takes up where Chavez Ravine left off. It continues Cooder's examination of a disappearing America, in this case the vanishing American "working man". "Nowadays nobody wants to be called a 'working man' - an SUV driver maybe - but not a working man." But what happened to this message of unity? Of solidarity? Of fairness or justice? What happened to the notion, "we are many, they are few."? These questions put Cooder on a path revisiting the place where so many of those old stories and struggles have been stowed away for safe-keeping; the country's foundation of music - its songs of praise, of sorrow, of work, of protest, of celebration. "What do poor people sing about? Death, Jesus, Mother and what happened today. They lived in poverty or worked in the mill and got their fingers chopped off - something horrible like that - but they carried that music along with them."

For more about the album visit: My Name is Buddy