I have been deaf since childhood. A question I get a lot is, “Can you hear music?” My answer, “yes,” is often met with shock and disbelief. But disabilities, including deafness, are on a spectrum. I am a deaf person who benefits from hearing aids, and those hearing aids help me hear music. The music I hear might not sound perfect, but so much of what I do hear, I love.
In the early ‘80s, while my friends were rocking out to tunes on the radio, I preferred listening to the vintage albums that my older siblings brought home from thrift stores. Bacharach and the Beatles, Sergio Mendes and Joni Mitchell—even though I couldn’t understand the lyrics, my hearing aids and my parents’ exemplary turntable and speakers helped me hear voices and instruments and melodies and harmonies, bass lines and drumbeats pumping through my feet all the way to my chest.
But I wasn’t just hearing the music. I was seeing and feeling it, too. I’d sit on the floor and pore over the records’ unique album covers: 12-and-a-half inch squares featuring photographs and illustrations and fonts, a fantastic introduction to the best—and worst—of graphic design. If I was really lucky, there might be lyrics on the album cover, too, and I could sing along. I’d pause my study (and my singing) for the tactile part of the experience: flipping the record over to place the needle down on the B-side, or pulling a different record out of its crinkly, vellum sleeve to start anew.
In my newest book, Animal Albums from A to Z, each letter of the alphabet is represented by its own album cover, with each cover showcasing a different genre as performed by various animal musicians. This book is meant to be a celebration of that visual and tactile experience that I’ve described. But the unavoidable truth is that music is still meant to be heard. As I painted and collaged and cut out letters with a katrillion X-Acto blades, I dreamed about making music to go with my art. With the help of more than 60 talented musicians—many of them friends since childhood—that dream came true. I left the cherished isolation of my studio in the woods to collaborate with old and new friends in a recording studio (and beyond), and now there are 26 silly songs in 26 different genres, all accessible via a QR code on the title page of the book.
My hope is that this book replicates some of the deep sensory joys of music: that readers young and old might pore over my illustrations like I pored over those old album covers; might turn the pages like I flipped a record to its other side; might sing along with the lyrics as I did—and that they might remember these songs fondly, the way I cherish the songs of my own charmed childhood.
Photo of Cece Bell by Tom Angelberger.
