THE AAG REVIEW OF MAPS ON VINYL
Reviewed by Joe Hedges, Department of Art, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA, for the Association of American Geographers.
Maps on Vinyl: An Atlas of Album Cover Maps, Volume No. 1 by Damien Saunder is a remarkable collection of more than 300 pages of images and insights connecting cartography to music and art. Central to the book’s success is Saunder’s own perspective—this is, after all, one individual’s curated collection, and the book itself stands as testament to the human desire to organize, collect, understand, and above all celebrate the creative achievements of others.
The book naturally leads readers toward questions about cartography itself. What do cartographers actually do? This is not a question I had asked myself before, but after living with the book for a few weeks, I realized there is far more abstraction involved in maps than one might assume. The map presents itself as an accurate, formal mathematical record of the world, but the book had me considering the role of abstraction—not just in maps and art, but as a fundamental part of human experience.
Maps abstract and filter one’s experience of the world. As Saunder explains, a map is a guide to the world, not a reproduction of it. As I read the book, I began thinking about how music and visual art similarly guide us through human experiences, shaping how we feel and think. That space between daily reality and art’s tendency to abstract that experience speaks to the inherent impossibility of truly accurate representation—but also the wonder of every attempt.
As a rock musician turned painting professor, I often begin my semester by introducing students to cave paintings. From the earliest days of our species, that tension between abstraction and reality is evident. Humans have a desire, an instinct even, to depict and catalog their surroundings. This spirit is exemplified by the sheer quantity of albums in Saunder’s own collection. These are photographs of his physical records, wear and all, and they reveal a cartographer’s impulse to represent and organize the world. This impulse appears most forcefully in a wonderful two-page infographic: a sort of metamap detailing the frequency of particular places as they appear on maps on album covers throughout the book.
Collection and curation have always been part of the arts. As the Internet age continues to fragment our artistic experience, the persistence of vinyl as a medium is, in many ways, evidence of our reluctance to let go of physical modes of creating and consuming media. Personal collections of albums have taken on deeper, more existential significance. Collectors always bring an individual perspective to their work, even as it is informed by professional experience and disciplinary norms. This is a wonderful example of interdisciplinary work connecting the author’s training as a cartographer with his passion for music. One has the sense that only Damien Saunder could have assembled this book, and it is a gift that he did.
The book is organized not chronologically but by wonderfully whimsical categories of the author’s own design such as “Astroworlds,” “On the Road,” and “Maps with Attitude.” This approach keeps the overall impact fresh and invites viewers to consider aesthetic connections across time. Again and again, the book invites quick comparison between different musical, visual, and technological moments in history, all through the lens of cartography. This particular and exciting organizational structure ends up being one of the book’s most interesting aspects.
The book makes clear the ways that physical locations and geography inform songwriting. It also invites us, though, to think about albums as maps to interior landscapes. For me as an artist and songwriter, what a magical thing—that this art form invites me into the mind and heart of the lyricist, allowing me to wander and explore places of an inner world otherwise inaccessible. In this way an album is a map. As it turns out, a map can be an album, too.
My first deep experiences with music were during the heyday of the cassette and the Walkman. I stole my parents’ Phil Collins and Genesis albums and retreated with headphones into my bedroom. I quickly realized the intense creative power of this medium. Albums invite us into the inner worlds of songwriters and performers. They open up to us like roads, meandering and wandering through the hearts and minds of creators. Years later, as a major label recording artist (July For Kings 2002) I got to experience firsthand from an artist’s perspective how those worlds are crafted and how label art directors help identify and shape connections between the visual and musical worlds created by songwriters.
Throughout the eighty-five years of music and design represented in the book, one aspect distinguishes twentieth- and twenty-first-century album covers. A careful observer might note that twentieth-century records mostly employ a single unified medium—colored pencil, airbrush, or paint. In the twenty-first century, however, the advent of digital tools made layering different visual elements much easier and faster, enabling a cleaner, more collaged quality to design. Printing technology factors in, too. As printing improved, more colors were introduced and photographic reproductions increased in quality.
This mirrors changes in recorded music. I would even argue that recording technology throughout the late twentieth century outpaced the tools visual artists were using. Album covers from the 1960s and 1970s relied on simple four-color palettes and relatively low-resolution reproductions, even as acts like The Beatles and The Beach Boys were already engaged in extreme sonic experimentation, layering and transforming their auditory palettes in ways that shocked and inspired generations. More recently, as computers enabled more production “in the box,” the sound of music became cleaner, and some might say more digital.
Of course, that is only half the story. Many older albums in this book look remarkably fresh, whereas some newer albums look deliberately retro. Part of the reason is album art’s enormous influence on popular culture and design—to the extent that all of us have some innate understanding of this visual vocabulary: negative space, funky fonts, bright colors. This book helps to demonstrate that so much of what we consider “good” design today originated on albums. In the 2000s, against the backdrop of commercial radio’s slick boy bands and pop stars, indie rock gained popularity alongside a vinyl resurgence. Artists like The White Stripes and MGMT deliberately preserved rough edges in their productions to communicate authenticity through an almost antidigital approach. MGMT’s 2005 EP Time to Pretend, featured prominently and early in the book’s first chapter, “C(art)ography,” makes use of retro printmaking textures evoking Roy Lichtenstein, yet this design was clearly organized digitally. Similarly, smash hits from that time like MGMT’s “Kids” were recorded using digital tools but modified and compressed to give listeners a noisy, deliberately analog vibe.
The book’s introduction recalls a fascinating history: how one man, Alex Steinweiss, successfully persuaded Columbia Records to start including art on album sleeves. This story resonated with me as I began imagining an alternative present—one where records continued to be manufactured and shipped in blank brown sleeves. It is almost impossible to imagine, because that connection between the visual arts and music—and yes, between cartography and nearly every other aspect of human experience—feels natural, intuitive, and fulfilling. For many music listeners like Saunder, album art is an indispensable part of the album experience.
Yet, as the digital twenty-first century lumbers on, new technologies threaten to cleave the physical from the digital. Although Saunder mentions the positive possibilities of digital animation and video connected with album art, more powerful tendencies are at play—tendencies that reduce album art to a two-inch graphic on glass screens while diminishing the role of the album itself. The album has been broken into pieces and replaced with algorithmically curated collections of tracks, part of the dizzying fragmentation of the contemporary world.
The book functions as a retort. Artists and collectors who look and listen intently and purposefully, who hold onto the physical past and insert it into the digital present, engage in a necessary subversive act. By connecting the album with the map, Saunder reminds us that both art forms locate us in the here and now, in our physical reality, even as they beautifully abstract it. In an age of streaming and algorithmic feeds, Maps on Vinyl makes the case that music, like geography, is something we experience not just through our ears, but through our whole selves.
17 Feb 2026
