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Elton John’s subsequent album will function quilt artwork via famed photographer David LaChapelle, Web page Six has discovered.
“I just got the call and I am already blabbing about,” LaChapelle informed Web page Six right through an interview for his newest exhibition, “Happy Together” at Visu Fresh in Miami, Fla.
John not too long ago printed at Brooklyn’s Barclays Heart — right through the Rock n’ Roll Corridor of Repute induction of his songwriting spouse Bernie Taupin — that the duo simply completed their newest undertaking.
The album “is going to surprise the s— out of you,” John mentioned. “It’s absolutely wonderful, and it’s full of youth, and it’s full of vitality.”
The “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” singer has been the entire rage once more after contemporary hits with Dua Lipa and Britney Spears.
Whilst no contracts were signed, LaChapelle is happy to get right down to paintings.
He’s had a protracted historical past with the “Rocket Man” crooner: They maximum not too long ago labored in combination at the excursion imagery for John’s “Farewell Yellow Brick Road” gigs from 2018 until closing 12 months.
LaChapelle — who has shot iconic pictures of David Bowie, Woman Gaga, Michael Jackson, Spears, Pam Anderson, Kanye West and lots of extra — first labored with John when he photographed him for a 1998 quilt of Interview mag.
John, 76, has all the time had particular that means for LaChapelle, 60, who tells Web page Six that he grew up with “his posters all over my bedroom.”
“This period in fourth grade we lived in North Carolina,” LaChapelle recalled to us, announcing he, “felt like such a freak and weirdo.” He added of the time, “Bible belt, gay, I was Christian, but they were condemning gay people… in fifth grade I started going through puberty. I didn’t feel like I fit in, or was going to be accepted.”
However he says John, as a rock icon, “showed me there was a place for me in the world… he was a big, important figure to me as a kid.”
The pair turned into buddies right through their Interview shoot, and LaChapelle later created quilt artwork for John’s “One Night Only” album in 2000. Then in 2004, he made degree projections for John’s residency on the Colosseum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, referred to as, “The Red Piano.”
“He said I could do whatever I want, and gave me full creative control,’ LaChapelle recalls. “He said, ‘just go do it.'”
For the approaching album, LaChapelle will concentrate to the tune to “get inspired.”
He says he thinks about “my pictures in the past… so it’s not repetitive or derivative. I like to do things fresh, and in the vein of that person and that song.”
LaChapelle’s new gallery display in Miami presentations his paintings in the course of the a long time beginning with the ’80s.
“I remember how I was at 21 — in NYC, in the East Village — and what a utopia it was until AIDS happened,” he remembered, name-dropping one of the greats at the artwork scene on the time together with Jean Michel Basquiat, Cindy Sherman, Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring. “I realized at the time it was a perfect place, the epicenter of the art world. I was idealistic.”
These days, “I feel full circle,” LaChapelle tells us. “I have come back to that mindset. I still feel how important art is. How it does effect change, and how people negatively and positively respond to pictures in popular culture.”
LaChapelle has additionally executed album covers for Dolly Parton, Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey and Keith Richards, to call a couple of.