“The first album I ever bought was Janis Ian’s Between the Lines.”
“I had just moved to Maine and we bought a record player for our tiny apartment in Portland. I was so excited to start my collection with that album. Later, I learned that it was also my late father’s favorite album in college and that made it even sweeter. It’s still one that I return to every year.
One of my earliest memories of my Dad is being a toddler running around the living room, galloping with my wooden horse while he played Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture,” and teaching me to gallop lightly so that the album didn’t skip. He was always putting on records and teaching me the words to his favorite songs. Thus began my musical education.
When I moved to Maine in my late twenties, I spent almost every weekend at a farm house in Vassalboro. There was no TV or internet, no smart phones. Just a record player and an amazing collection of records. We’d spend all day outside and then come in and listen to records for hours on end. Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, Led Zeppelin, Sly and the Family Stone, Jim Croce.
During the week, back in Portland, I’d scout out the record stores for something new. It was my one splurge, and because there were so few distractions, so much of that period revolved around the record player. It was also then that I got serious about my own songwriting.
Bull Moose in Portland is hands-down my favorite record store. I had worked out a deal with my boss at the time to have Fridays off to work on music—so most Fridays, I’d walk to Bull Moose for inspiration. It made me feel like one of the “cool” people to know my way around that scene.
I remember getting so excited about release days. When Fleet Foxes’ second album came out, I bought one of the first copies and came home and listened to it for weeks. I especially remember that album because I got really depressed by it, feeling like I wasn’t working hard enough to pursue my own passion to be a full-time musician. It lit a fire under me to make an album of my own. For some reason, that album more than any other seemed to force me to face my fear of failure, buckle down and write!”
—Abigail Dowd
Abigail Dowd’s new release, Not What I Seem arrives in stores on April 5th.
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PHOTO: TODD TURNER
