By Mike Sain't Louis ·
Mirror: white feathers and running mascara
Feathers, lots of feathers. A white boa wraps around the torso of the guy on the cover as if he were a swan halfway through transforming. And on his face, black make-up streaming from his eyes, like mascara after a long night or after tears nobody wanted to hide.
The title is Mirror, and the image has something of that: the gaze goes straight to whoever is looking, without blinking. I like to think the mirror is you. That the song asks you what you see when you look at yourself, the swan or the running mascara, and that the right answer is both at once.
There's a lot of wounded glamour on this cover, a lot of a drag queen at dawn half taking off her make-up. Beauty and disaster in the same shot, and neither apologises for being there.
Listen to it in front of your own mirror. With feathers, if you have any.