“To be honest, the first time I set a needle to a record was only about 7 years ago. I was born in 1984 and so by the time I was really interested in music, cassettes and CDs were the most commonly available. My family didn’t own a record player—I think maybe my grandparents had an old Victrola in the basement but it was basically furniture.”
“In fact, my first real memory of being excited about music of any kind wasn’t until Christmas 1995. I asked for and got my first boombox CD/Cassette combo, paired with the soundtracks from my two favorite movies at the time—Batman Forever and Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. So needless to say, I was a late bloomer. Here are a few memories that come to mind with regard to my discovery of vinyl:
1. In 2009, I was in Seattle to open a show for Ben Folds in Bellingham, WA. It was just a one-off opportunity but I was still excited out of my mind for the opportunity. I had never been to WA and barely had any money back then and so I remember having to call in favors to get picked up at the airport at midnight, sleep on someone’s couch, and then bum a ride to Bellingham from another singer-songwriter my manager was friends with.
Except it turns out he was busy that night and so his girlfriend—who none of us knew—offered to drive us the 2 hours there and back instead. With a little time to kill that day, our new friends showed us around Seattle—specifically a little artsy neighborhood called Fremont. We wandered into a record shop and for some reason, despite not owning a record player myself or having ever bought vinyl before, I walked out with U2’s War album and Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA. Those were the first 2 records I ever bought.
2. It’s Thanksgiving 2010 and I’m in my girlfriend’s apartment in Brooklyn. She had just moved there for culinary school and I was a few years into pursuing a music career, about to leave for tour after the holidays. She had just bought one of those cheap novelty record players for like 100 bucks at Urban Outfitters and was setting it up in the living room one morning as we were making coffee.
We were both big fans of an artist named Greg Laswell and I had just bought a copy of his Covers album on 7″ after randomly opening for him in Chicago a few weeks earlier. I brought it with me to New York and set it on the turntable as my girlfriend poured hot water into a french press. With natural light poured in the back window where the record player was resting on the windowsill, I placed the needle on the record and let Side A play through as we sipped coffee, talked about our plans for the day, and ate breakfast.
3. Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago is one of my wife’s and my favorite albums. I bought it for her in 2011 and since we recently said adios to the Urban Outfitters novelty player. We now listen to it on our 1980’s Panasonic automatic turntable/receiver combo that I bought last year for my birthday. It currently resides in our studio/workspace in southern CA.
4. In 2014 I had the pleasure of pressing my own record Black Bear on vinyl. The process was a little arduous—I think I went through 2 or 3 test pressings where I swear I was hearing little pops and snaps in the audio. I wasn’t used to hearing my songs underneath the gentle crackle that a turntable creates.
I love having music available on vinyl and I see how it’s becoming more and more relevant to my fans each time I tour. I probably sell vinyl 3 to 1 over CDs these days. I think maybe in today’s culture where it is so easy and convenient to click a button on our phone and have an infinite amount of music available to us, there is something satisfying about having to do the little bit of work that it requires to take a record out of its sleeve, place it on the table, and apply the needle.
There’s something more intentional about it and as a lot of things in life are getting easier thanks to technology. I’ve found that people are craving a little more intentionality to some degree.”
—Andrew Belle
“Dive Deep” is the first single from Andrew Belle’s forthcoming and third full length album produced by Chad Copelin (Ben Rector, Sufjan Stevens, Broncho, Ivan & Alyosha).
