Album Cover Artist Gary Burden Dies

Tibrina Hobson / FilmMagic – Gary Burden
Artist Gary Burden attends the photography of Henry Diltz in celebration Of The Doors’ 2012 Sunset Strip Music Festival at The Standard Hotel on August 15, 2012 in Los Angeles, California. 

Gary Burden, the artist who designed album covers for Neil Young, The Doors, Eagles, Joni Mitchell and others, died at age 84. The cause of death was not revealed.  

Burden designed artwork for Neil Young’s After The Gold Rush, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Déjà vu, The Doors’ Morrison Hotel and Joni Mitchell’s Blue, among the many.

Young paid tribute to his friend on his Archives website.

“My friend for life, Gary was my art director, creating album covers with me for almost 50 years, beginning with After the Gold Rush and ending with Paradox and Roxy, my next two albums.”

“I still have some covers for unreleased albums that we made together,” he said. “They are coming. We probably made 40 covers. I lost count. In the last twenty, thirty or so years, Gary has worked alongside his talented and beautiful wife, Jenice, at R. Twerk & Co, as we have continued on a life-time of making album covers, laughing, loving acoustic music and so many other things. My heart is heavy.”

Burden also designed covers for My Morning Jacket, Monsters of Folk, and Conor Oberst, Rolling Stone said.

He won a Grammy Award in 2010 for best boxed or special limited-edition packaging for his work on Young’s The Archives Vol. 1 1963–1972.