Heaven and Earth Digs Glen Wexler

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Heaven and Earth’s “Dig” album cover by Glen Wexler

Glen Wexler Creates Cover Art For Heaven and Earth’s Latest Album,”Dig”

Heaven and Earth, the creation of lead guitarist, Stuart Smith, fuses elements of hard rock, metal and blues, to create its unique, celestial brand of classic rock for audiences all over the world. With obvious influences from iconic rock bands such as Deep Purple, Rainbow and Bad Company, Heaven and Earth blends old-school rock with a new-school attitude. The band includes guitarist Stuart Smith, singer Joe Retta, bassist Chuck Wright, drummer Richie Onori and keyboardist Arlan Schierbaum.

In 2013, Heaven and Earth released its latest album, Dig, which also featured rock veterans Howard Leese (from Heart) and David Paich (from Toto) and Richie Sambora (from Bon Jovi). In addition, Dig also features the album cover art of Glen Wexler, an artist who has designed over 300 album covers for rock bands such as Kiss, ZZ Top, Van Halen, and Black Sabbath. Wexler also creates a classic old-school rock album cover with a new -school attitude to perfectly compliment the music on the Dig album. All vinyl collectors and classic rock fans will certainly want to add this record album to their collections.

Recorded at Ocean Studio, Dig was in the making for 14 months before being released by Quarto Valley Records on both vinyl and CD. Heaven and Earth brought in legendary album cover artist, Glen Wexler to create the artwork for Dig. After listening to their music, Wexler came up with the concept and the title for the album. “Essentially, when I first heard the music, I got the sense that I was listening to something that maybe was lost in the vaults for 40 years, maybe a Deep Purple collaboration that was never released,” said Wexler.

The Wexler cover art features a giant guitar being dug out of a Star Wars-like landscape that represents the rock & roll artifact of some futuristic archeological dig. This art has the mystery and surrealistic feel of a Wexler album cover and really adds to the experience for any Heaven and Earth fan.

“To me, an album without the visual is not the entire experience,” Wexler stated. “As a kid, my album covers were my art collection. That was really influential stuff. I’ve learned more from album covers than I did in art school, that’s the stuff that really influenced my work. I lived for getting my hands on vinyl and having that experience of unwrapping it, you know, the full visual aspect of pulling out the disc and putting it on the turntable. It’s a whole different experience than you get in the digital world.” The significance of the “vinyl experience” is also expressed by Stuart Smith: “It is the way music is meant to be played. With vinyl, you intentionally listen to the music and read along with the lyrics and gaze upon the cover art.”

Wexler also directed the videos for the Dig album.