A new Starflyer 59 album, titled Lust for Gold, is on the horizon, which is usually reason enough to celebrate. Velvet Blue Music’s announcement, however, contains a detail that might fly under the radar of most, but will elicit some nostalgia among those who know: Lust for Gold’s CD edition will come in an honest-to-goodness longbox designed by Jason 71.
A certain portion of Opus’ audience may be asking themselves, “What’s a CD?” But a larger portion is probably asking themselves, “What’s a CD longbox?” When I started buying CDs in the early ’90s, they were packaged in a longbox, which, as the name suggests, was a long paperboard box that contained the actual CD jewel case. From Wikipedia:
When compact discs first began to appear in the retail stores, the longbox packaging served a transitional purpose, allowing shops to file new compact discs in the same bins originally used for vinyl records. Longboxes were 12 inches (30 cm) tall (the same length as the standard 33⅓ LP), and capable of containing two separate discs when necessary. Most longboxes were full color, with details about the compact disc on the back, and artwork that was frequently taken from the original square album cover art, reworked for the new shape and size. There were generic white longboxes with windows that would display the compact disc cover, as well as clear plastic versions that were an inexpensive substitute for a printed longbox.
Longboxes were expensive to produce and environmentally wasteful, so they were eventually phased out for removable plastic frames of roughly the same size. But as the CD format grew in popularity and supplanted vinyl, record stores began converting their bins and shelving to accommodate shrink-wrapped CDs, removing the need for any sort of extra packaging altogether.
I doubt that Lust for Gold’s release will kick off a longbox revival, but it’s a fun detail that’s perfectly in keeping with Starflyer 59’s trademark nostalgic bent. And it makes me wish I’d kept some of those longboxes of yore, such as the one for The Cure’s Disintegration.