Feature

Amores Perros: The Wonderful World of Dog Album Covers

Written By:

Phil Cho

November 28, 2023

Tags:

Paul McCartney with his Old English Sheepdog Martha

For our latest “Art & Design In Focus” feature we take a look at our favorite canine album covers.

With the National Dog Show having just passed this weekend (congratulations to Stache the Sealyham terrier!), dogs are unsurprisingly on our minds. Man’s best friends have made their way into pretty much every part of our lives, and music is, of course, no exception. Countless songs have been inspired by our canine companions: The Beatles’ “Martha My Dear” is about Paul McCartney’s Old English Sheepdog; Jon Hassell wrote “Blues Nile” in tribute to his Egyptian-looking dog; Chuck Senrick’s “The Duke Is Gone” is a lament on a lost friend; Dolly Parton’s “Cracker Jack” tells the tale of Lucy Jane and her adopted terrier.

This past Saturday, over a dozen dogs joined their music-loving owners to shop and browse through records for the Community Label Sale at our Sound & Vision pop-up at ROW DTLA. We’ve also recently welcomed a new dog into the In Sheep’s Clothing family. Anyways – all of this got us thinking… We’re long-overdue for another Art & Design In Focus, so why not follow up our Cat Album Covers feature with a look at some of our favorite canine album covers?

Naturally, dogs are featured on many classic album covers. Kate Bush cuddles twin Weimaraners, “Bonnie” and “Clyde”, on her essential Hounds of Love. There’s the amazing mop-shaped Hungarian herding dog (Puli) on Beck’s Odelay. Two speedy greyhounds race around Walthamstow Stadium on Blur’s Parklife. Bert Jansch holds a young golden retriever pup on his Birthday Blues. The list goes on and on.

Note: While the theme of this feature is quite unserious and just a bit of fun, we do highly recommend this practice of approaching your collection in new ways. Engaging with album artwork is easily one of the very best aspects of owning vinyl, and finding ways to re-engage is essential to keeping the experience fresh. One day you might notice a recurring theme and decide to spend a day listening to only albums with comic book style art. Another day it might be a specific artist or a vintage font.

For this particular feature, we’ve decided to limit ourselves to album covers with dogs that seem to have a personal connection with the artist/owner. These are clearly very good pups to have made it onto the artist’s album cover! For an extra bit of fun, we’ve also tried to identify the breed of each dog and included links to listen to our favorite tracks on the albums. Like most posts on this site, we hope this feature opens up a portal into a new artist, album, genre, or even dog obsession.