“My earliest memories of vinyl was dancing (terribly) and wildly to Whitney Houston in my parent’s living room when I was four years old. It was a visceral experience for me, I was often drawn to touch (and break) the needle and feel the record spin. I remember the feeling of carpet beneath my bare feet, I remember stopping only to catch my breath or when my mom told me to turn it off. Those very early interactions with music hugely inform my life as a musician and songwriter today.”
“My parents raised me on pop music, and I’ve been drawn to that pop sensibility ever since. To me, pop music began with album covers, I would leaf through my parents collection and stop at an image that caught my eye. Vinyl was about that whole journey of discovery: the artwork that drew me in, the weight of it, the soft hissing noise it would emit when I put it on.
The album covers I remember most vividly were Scandal, Wham, Duran Duran, Pat Benatar, and Michael Jackson. I remember these covers so vividly, they’ve become apart of the memory. I felt closer to the artists because I could hold them in my hands—there’s really nothing like that feeling.
From vinyl, I eventually graduated to CDs. I had all the top 40 prepubescent pop classics: No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom, and TLC’s “Red Light Special,” Third Eye Blind’s self titled. Reading the lyrics and the liner notes were so formative for me, this was before artists shared their personal history on Instagram—it felt like a secret letter from them to me. I felt like I was apart of a club.
I’m so grateful to have experienced that era, before streaming and downloading music. I was given permission to really dig into artists, album by album, spending hours at a time to really feel what the artist was communicating. People have such a different relationship to music now because of its accessibility—nothing is sacred—it’s just apart of a vast, invisible catalog. It’s so impersonal. All the effort that goes into writing, recording, painstakingly deciding on cover art, and releasing an album is wasted on our modern ADD online process of catch and release.
We lose the thing that makes music feel like “ours” found through some divine intervention as we thumbed our way through rows upon rows of germy sleeves at some independent record store, or as in my case, growing up in a small Northwestern town with a severe lack of hip “indie-culture,” carefully selected from a shiny isle of the nearest Best Buy.
The nostalgia of owning a beautiful physical object makes the shopping process so much more enjoyable. It’s why I continue to collect records for my own personal library today.”
—Sharaya Mikael
Banta’s full-length debut album Dark Charms arrives in stores April 15, 2016 via eOne Music. On vinyl.
