Here’s the List of Record Store Day 2020 Releases Revealed So Far: There are apparently exclusives from Neil Young, David Bowie, Gorillaz, Black Sabbath and more. Record Store Day is gearing up for its main 2020 event, and we are already getting an idea what exclusives to expect this year. While the official 2020 RSD list has yet to be revealed, several artists and labels have started announcing titles, while other rumoured releases have begun popping up online. To start making sense of it all, we’ve assembled a list of both the official and rumoured Record Store Day 2020 releases revealed so far. In large part, the list comes thanks to the dedicated vinyl fanatics over on Reddit, who have been slowly but surely putting this year’s RSD list together. As you’ll see below, the 2020 RSD list is still very much in its early stages, but there are already plenty of notable releases incoming.
Farmers Branch, TX | Josey Records To Become the Largest Record Store in Texas: The Farmers Branch shop is adding 10,000-square-feet to its already sizable footprint. Josey Records is taking over the 10,000-square-foot space next door to its 15,000-square-foot flagship store in Farmers Branch, making it the largest record store in Texas and one of the five largest record stores in the country. The shop plans to open its expansion for Record Store Day on April 18, 2020. Josey Records started in Dallas and has opened satellite stores in Lubbock, Tulsa, Kansas City, and Sedalia, Missouri, but it didn’t have any plans to grow in the DFW market until an opportunity presented itself. “The tenant next door used to be a motorcycle supply shop, and they moved out in the summer, so we thought we would just take it over and add more square footage to the store,” says co-owner Waric Cameron. “We have tons of inventory that we don’t have out on display that we keep in offsite storage, so this is an opportunity to bring all that to the retail floor.”
NJ | ‘An absolute nightmare’: How a distribution crisis is crippling N.J. record stores: Record stores across New Jersey are suffering from a problem that feels almost as vintage as the weathered shops themselves: their vinyl and CD deliveries are late — really late. “I just got in Christmas records — I ordered them in October,” says Susan Grimm, a manager at Scotti’s Record Shop in Summit. “We’re getting orders we placed two or three months ago, it’s an absolute nightmare,” says Princeton Record Exchange owner Jon Lambert, echoing a sentiment felt by stores throughout the Garden State, and beyond, who after years spent battling industry trends that have shifted away from physical media in favor of iTunes and streaming, now grapple with a new dilemma: a profit-hemorrhaging break in the supply chain…“We’ve had to take a significant percentage hit in our profit,” says another New Jersey shop owner, who asked not to be named. “… (Direct Shot) doesn’t know what they’re doing, and I don’t know what the endgame is.”
Jamaica Plain, MA | New Biz: Bakery + Coffee Shop + Record Store = Monumental Market: A unique business venture recently opened on South Street. Monumental Market is a joint venture between three different businesses: Lavender Bee Baking Co., El Colombiano Coffee, and Light of Day Records. The individual businesses are known entities in our area. El Colombiano Coffee and Light of Day Records are both regular vendors at the Egleston Farmers Market. While building their brands, the two businesses traveled to different businesses, including the Wake Up The Earth Festival. Light of Day sells new and vintage vinyl records. It joins a growing list of businesses that sell vinyl records in JP, including Deep Thoughts and Tres Gatos, which is also a tapas restaurant. Lavender Bee Baking Co. makes peanut and tree-nut free baked goods. Lavender’s owner Kelsey Munger was diagnosed with a peanut and tree nut allergy at the age of 6, and eventually started baking because it was hard to find baked goods that didn’t include what she couldn’t eat. This is the first brick and mortar storefront for all three businesses.
Brooklyn, NY | Williamsburg Record Store Norman’s Sound & Vision Closes Its Doors: Amid a boom for record stores across the borough, a vinyl institution has shut up shop in Williamsburg. Norman’s Sound & Vision, located at 555 Metropolitan Avenue, shuttered late last year. The awning is still up, but the store has been cleared out and signs on the window (as well as online listings) show the landlord is looking for a new tenant. The store opened at 67 Cooper Square in Manhattan in 1994 and was known, for many years, as a destination for those who liked to dig through piles of old records and compact discs. After a rent hike, according to an article in The Local East Village, they were pushed out of the neighborhood and ended up in Williamsburg, where they opened up the second incarnation of the shop in August 2012. “Now the people who live here are lawyers and stockbrokers; they’d much rather go play golf than listen to music,” he told The Local East Village about his former neighborhood in 2012. His hope was to find a younger, music-savvy audience in Williamsburg. But in the intervening years, Williamsburg has also changed.
Rochester, NY | Record Archive celebrating 45 years with special performance by Mikaela Davis & Southern Star: A music and entertainment destination in Rochester is celebrating four and a half decades in business this year, including Thursday with a special in-store performance and party. 2020 marks 45 years of business for Record Archive. To celebrate, the Rockwood Street store will host some of Rochester’s finest local musicians once a month, throughout the year. Thursday’s performance will feature Mikaela Davis and Southern Star. Davis is a hometown harpist who is making big moves nationally in the jam music scene. Last summer she joined Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead on stage for the final performance at the Lockn’ music festival in Arrington, Virgina. Davis has previously toured throughout the country and Europe with Bon Iver and Marco Benevento, but she still makes time for hometown performances, including an afternoon set at last year’s Lilac Festival, and Thursday’s event at Record Archive.
Boston, MA | New farmers market offers vinyl record collection alongside coffee, baked treats: Visitors and residents of Jamaica Plain can now browse through vintage music while enjoying coffee and baked goods at a newly-opened farmers market in Boston. Monumental Market began operating regular hours on Tuesday, offering drinks from El Colombiano Coffee, treats from Lavender Bee Baking Co. and a selection of vinyl records provided by Light of Day Records. The market was created as a joint project between the three small-businesses who came together to sell their goods in conjunction with each other. Javier Amador-Pena, owner of El Colombiano Coffee and one of the three founders of Monumental Market, grew up on the coast of Colombia, where coffee serves as a staple in daily life. He said he began looking to expand when his business showed promising growth. “People like the coffee and the flavors and the story behind it,” Amador-Pena said. “Every cup of coffee tells the story of back home where I drink my coffee from.”
Bristol, UK | The remarkable story of Naoki, the Tokyo champion of Bristol music: Following his death, musicians across the city are coming together to support his family. Musicians across Bristol are coming together to create a compilation album – to raise money for the family of a remarkable man who took the sounds of the city to Japan. Naoki Iijima began collecting records made by Bristol artists in the 1980s, but fell in love with the city on a visit in 1994 – at the height of the so-called ‘Bristol Sound’ which saw bands and artists from Bristol conquer the world. And when he went home, he and his wife Miwako set up a record shop in Tokyo called Disk Shop Zero, totally devoted to music from Bristol. Over the decades, the couple forged long-lasting friendships with many on the Bristol music scene, from the members of Massive Attack to dubstep artist Pinch, and visited the city often, while championing Bristol’s music acts when they toured Japan.
David Bowie Live LP ‘I’m Only Dancing (The Soul Tour 74)’ Set for Record Store Day: Previously unissued live recordings bridge gap between Diamond Dogs and Young Americans. A previously unissued David Bowie live album highlighting the singer’s mid-Seventies work is set for Record Store Day. I’m Only Dancing (The Soul Tour 74), featuring segments of a pair of concerts from that trek, bridges the gap between 1974’s Diamond Dogs and 1975’s Young Americans. Bowie’s site announced the release Thursday. Previous Bowie live albums from the 1974 tour — 1974’s David Live and the 2017 reissue Cracked Actor (Live Los Angeles ’74) — were recorded prior to the I’m Only Dancing concerts, which featured a more soul music focus as well as the Mick Garson Band backing Bowie. The bulk of I’m Only Dancing is taken from an October 20th, 1974 gig at Detroit’s Michigan Palace, with three tracks from a Nashville concert on November 30th, 1974. The live album will available as both 2 CDs and 2 LPs on Record Store Day, April 18. The LP’s artwork mirrors the original design for the programs from the 2 gigs.
