Rachael Lavelle, Big Dreams

Nearly ten years in the making Rachael Lavelle’s debut album Big Dreams is an existential coming-of-age album that chronicles the journey of a young woman searching for direction and meaning in a very strange world. Inspired by sounds of everyday life and an intriguing obsession with YouTube self-help videos, the album explores romance, directionlessness, ambition and the expectations of the unsatisfied digital native. Swirling and surreal, the album reflects on youthful dreams from a more jaded, adult perspective and pokes holes in the digital, postmodern reality it exists within.

The album artwork reflects this naive idea of a dream world in its pastel Disney aesthetic. We wanted to create a very calm image with just a hint of melancholy and ‘a bit of weird’. The image is a collage of a photograph of Rachael lying on a huge, pink, satin pillow (made by Sarah Flanagan and shot by Cáit Fahey) and some overlayed stock images paired with some rogue use of AI, making a slightly unconvincing digital-dream-reality. 

The title Big Dreams is set in a version of the typeface University, designed at the Letraset Type Studio in 1983 and it is commonplace in our everyday lives as it appears with great frequency on hairdressers, florists, sewing instructions and smutty literature etc. It balances the Disney aesthetic whilst being mysteriously familiar.

Rachael released three songs as singles, accompanied by three music videos directed by Bob Gallagher. We extracted images from the three videos and framed them in a circle for the single artworks to unify them, as well as to differentiate them from the album itself.

When Rachael went to Tour the album around Ireland and the UK, we designed merchandise  by extracting some evocative lines from the song lyrics.