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MARCH THIS MONTH:

San Cisco

The Jesus and Mary Chain

Peter Garrett

Missy Higgins

Looking back at the stories behind our favourite album covers, this month it’s Ariana Grande’s 2018 LP Sweetener.

A portrait is a very safe image to go with on an album cover. And that is, technically, what Ariana Grande did for her fourth studio album Sweetener – which features hits No Tears Left to Cry, God Is a Woman and Breathin . And yet... she’s upside-down. What’s with that? After confusing fans with tweets in upside-down text and then

Eternal Sunshine by Ariana Grande is out March 8 via Universal.

unveiling Sweetener’ s cover art in June 2018, Ari revealed the secret on the platform now known as X. The inspiration had come in a particular moment she was sitting opposite her friend Aaron Simon Gross, and slid her phone across the table to show him a picture. ”He said, ’I even love it upside-down,’ and that was kind of it for me,” she wrote. ”At the time I had been feeling very ’upside-down’ for a while, and the simplicity of that was like, ’oh duh, wow, my bestie a genius.’ Everything clicked after that.” Shot by Grande’s longtime collaborator Dave Meyers, the image was also the first cover artwork in the artist’s discography to be in colour. Grande addressed this point too, saying it symbolised ”a new chapter”, and adding: ”For the first time, my life is in colour as well.”

66 MARCH 2024

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