This is quite a site: Musical Maps, whose title isn’t quite descriptive, since it lists and illustrates the locations of a wide variety of music album cover photos. Still, it’s a place to meander for a while, to sample and follow your idle curiosity, only to find our more time than you thought disappeared while looking up the location of x, y and z. And another one after z. And that reminded you of another – scroll down – wait, what about a, b and then c?

The cover of Hotel California, which does such a good job of evoking some dark desert corner of California, a place of colitas smell and no exit — is for example actually urban, on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

Looks like there’s been some gentrification since Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five posed on 123rd St. in Manhattan in 1982.

Our Man in New Orleans – an Al Hirt disk from 1963 that I’m pretty sure was around the house when I was growing up – features the trumpeter in front of 941 Bourbon Street, at night with shadows for that extra New Orleans vibe (and probably to avoid the heat).

Good to see that at least two Chicago albums depict Chicago in some form. Chicago 13 is a variation on Marina Towers.

Part of the site is organized geographically. The inordinate number of shots taken in New York City and California and various parts of the UK is little surprise. This isn’t a list of Bollywood soundtrack albums, after all.

I was inspired to look for the most remote location, at least on this list. I was hoping someone, maybe some prog rocker of the ’70s, had used an image of a moai or a row of them, which would put it on Easter Island, but apparently not.

Hit Collective goes Bossa Vol. 1 features a view of Rio from Christ the Redeemer, which seems fitting, but a little further away is that busy set of musicians called Various Artists and their album Guitare, whose cover was shot at the colorful Dr. del Valle Iberlucea 1256 in Buenos Aires. Both places one can aspire to see.