“Full disclosure: whatever that trait is that compels people to say that vinyl records are sonically superior to all other forms of music listening, I don’t have it.”
“I don’t doubt that it’s true, I just don’t have an ear for such things. I can tell the difference between a high-bitrate MP3 and a crap Napster-era MP3, but that’s about it. For me, vinyl is a pure, unapologetic nostalgia accelerator. It breathes that specific brand of warmth into music both old and new, whatever I’m listening to, like an old cardigan I make all my friends put on when they hug me. The crackling dust and imperfections, the little variations in pitch as the speed of the turntable wavers or the warped record undulates, these are the sounds of a time machine being torn open inside me. I’m taken back, both to the time when life was small and safe, and the time that music first deconstructed itself in a way that dared me to spend a life figuring out how to build it back.
I grew up at first just listening to my parents’ record collection: Motown, The Mamas and Papas, Don McLean. My dad had a Garrard turntable and two heavy speakers his buddy brought back from Vietnam. The first record I remember buying with my own money was Thriller. My brothers and I pooled our allowance to bring it home and triumphantly took turns looking at the inside picture of MJ with the baby tiger, turning away only when the record had to be flipped over again.
Thriller is a masterpiece, however complicated it is to enjoy knowing what we know now. But it’s not the record that changed my life. That would be New Edition’s eponymous debut, specifically the last song on Side A, “Delicious.” Specifically the last minute and 54 seconds of it. Specifically the last 33 seconds of that.
New Edition was a sort of mid-eighties R&B precursor to boy bands who made innocuous love songs that 7-year-old me really connected with for some reason. And “Delicious” is particularly sweet, with cheerful major 7 chords creating a sunny meadow that an ebullient synth bass gallops through as Johnny Gill sings about rainbows and springtime and eternal puppy love.
The part that absolutely fucked me up though was the outro. After the bridge, the final chorus repeats a few times before it starts breaking down, first just drums and vocals and then just the background harmonies. Single words sung in 5 parts, with daring, empty space echoing between them: HOLD. YOU. YOU. DELICIOUS. It fades out on that. Now I’m already a sucker for a drums-and-vocals chorus breakdown (see: every good Alabama song from the same era) but this was the first time I’d heard the elements separately, and the first time I’d ever heard a song devolve into just a background part as it fades away. It BLEW MY MIND.
By this time I had my own record player, and I sat there on the floor of my room moving the needle back over and over, staring out the window and thinking about what a powerful thing love must be to make this kid sing so earnestly about someone. I wanted to feel that way, and this song let me close my eyes and pretend.
And that outro, which probably only happened as a last-minute mixing change to what was planned as a traditional fade out, let me peek behind the curtain just enough to actually see some of how an arrangement is built. It’s less remarkable now; you can do the same reverse-engineering with Nine Inch Nails intros and Jimmy Eat World outros among others. But this was my way in to thinking about the emotional alchemy of music and how its ingredients combine to cast potent spells on a listener’s heart.
For my new record, and this single specifically, I wanted to evoke that same playful technicolor energy. I wanted to make pop songs that borrowed less of the synth sounds of that era but more the horns and the kinetic percussion. I’m waiting on the test pressings of the vinyl now, and imagining how it’ll sound on my dad’s Garrard (which I still have and use as my main record player).
I hope it holds up to sustained window-gazing.”
—Michael Flynn
Survive With Me, the new album from Michael Flynn arrives in stores on October 13—on vinyl.
