Author Archives: Special to TVD

“From the height of a small child gazing up at the bureau, some of my earliest memories were born.”

“There in the dining room, my grandfather’s beloved record player would sit, and Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf would emanate from the room. The bustle of my grandmother cooking in the adjacent kitchen, the TV softly murmuring in the living room, and the Southern California suburbs of the early ’80s would dissipate as I was whisked into another world, a world that at times felt more tangible in my mind than that which existed in my reality. Music profoundly shaped my imagination and symbolized a kind of freedom for which I was relentless in my pursuits.

My grandfather was a lover of classical music and had an extensive collection of vinyl records, with the likes of Mahler, Beethoven, Choin, Stravinsky, and many more. At the age of four, I would improvise short cantatas which my grandmother would score in her well worn and tattered music book. Imagining myself the composer of an opera one day, I’d sit in a little nook I created in the dining room, eating string cheese, and one by one peel the layers as I dreamt. I absorbed the organic quality to the audio, the scratches and earthiness as the music’s timbres would rise and fall. I loved the physicality of placing the record on the turntable, carefully setting the needle, and letting the crackling sound of the speakers fill my ears.

My mom also shared a feverish love of music and vinyl records with my grandfather. She and her sisters all loved to sing together. One would take the melody and the other two each took a harmony line. Their voices would fill the room at holiday parties and family gatherings. My grandmother was a talented pianist who taught lessons for a time. Ours was a musical family and I always felt so grateful to have had the early experience of the record layer.

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“Music was so much more fragile and coveted when it was just in a tangible form. There was fear of scratching a CD you worked hard to pay for, or unraveling a cassette, or even breaking a vinyl. You would display your rack of CDs or frame your vinyl, like there was a certain pride in the music you listened to. I think that’s why to this day there is so much support of tangible records and why it will never fully die. There is a certain nostalgia to holding a record somebody worked so hard for, not just a link. It’s where music and sound meet body and soul.”

“Growing up, my Aunt had this beautiful farm about 45 minutes out of my hometown, and in one of her rooms, she had this red record player and stacks of records she had collected over the years. I used to love to just pick a random one, put it on, and dance until it stopped, beg my mom to flip it for me, and then dance again. It was great, and at that age I didn’t really realise how special records and vinyl were and still are, obviously.

As I grew up, I listened to lots of cassettes and CDs as my dad had this incredible collection of them in our basement. Great bands like Deee-Lite, Pat Metheny, Salt-N-Pepa, Enya, and Art of Noise. I got cultured by lots of bangin’ ’90s records and artists. By the time I became a young adult around 15, my dad opened the door into the ’80s for me and that was a game changer. I was the only kid requesting Tears for Fears and Bowie at parties. When Spotify kind of started to take over, I got into a lot of ’80s groups as Spotify basically did all of the work for me. I’d listen to Howard Jones, and there it was “Fans also like… Thompson Twins, Wang Chung, Berlin, and Flock of Seagulls.”

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“Growing up, my parents’ old record player was dusty, beige and weathered by constant use, a beautiful artefact of the ’70s. It sat downstairs on top of a shelf which was studded with the best of ’70s and early ’80s rock and pop—Joe Jackson, Led Zeppelin, John Farnham, Elton John, U2, Talking Heads—alongside a smattering of operetta and musical theatre cast albums.”

“The first record I remember spinning on repeat was Led Zeppelin IV. The packaging was falling apart and it skipped in places. I remember staring at the cover image of the man bending under the weight of all the sticks on his back and thinking it was incredible that they’d put out a record with neither band name or album title on the cover. My Dad owned every Led Zep album and t-shirt you could buy. He raised me to appreciate their mind-bending playing, and to understand there had never been a band quite like them before, and probably never would be again.

Listening to a record like that, and then spending Saturday nights watching the live DVDs, all I could think about was how much I wanted it to be me making music like that. The euphoria on the faces of the crowd, watching in awe as Zeppelin powered through a relentless three-hour show, perfect strangers connected to each other through this music. I wished it was me up there, fusing with my best friends into one four-headed monster and touching touching people’s souls all over the world in a way they’d never be able to forget.

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“It’s 2007 in Arcata, CA, and we’ve packed up everything Jason owns into a U-haul truck—his banjo shop tools, stacks of kiln-dried wood, a bed, a few kitchen tools, and a box of vinyl records.”

“The records were given to us as a wedding gift; the gifter was the man who introduced us. He knew both of us well enough to know that a box of carefully selected vinyl—records from Folkways, Appalshop, June Appal, Rounder, Arhoolie, County—were about as precious a gift as we could receive. This box was anxiously waiting to meet up with Pharis’ carefully stowed box of vinyl, sitting in Victoria, BC. Jason hadn’t seen her collection (they married 3 months after they met), but he knew it would be good.

She had told him early on about her mom’s original pressing of the White Album, complete with the photo inserts and a small burn from a house fire when Pharis was a kid. She had the first four Led Zeppelin albums, a collection of Joni Mitchell to envy any record store, a consecutive series of Bonnie Raitt from the start to ‘80s, and the original zipper still on the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers. If Jason had still had his own vinyl box (he lost it in a flood), he would have had many of the same.

There’s a band from the ‘30s called Hoyt Ming and His Pepsteppers. This song, “Tupelo Blues,” features Hoyt’s wife Rozelle (the “pepstepper”) tapping on the floor with her hard-bottomed shoes, keeping a righteous beat. A month after they met, Pharis sent the song to Jason to check out—he knew immediately that she was the one.

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“I first began my love affair with vinyl as a boy in Houston, Texas. Part of our Christmas routine was taking turns flipping LPs while trimming the tree and drinking eggnog. With the sounds of The Jackson 5, The Supremes, Carla Thomas, Stevie Wonder, and The Temptations as the backdrop, I fell in love with the ritual of vinyl. Searching for the right record for the moment, pulling it out the sleeve, cuing up the track and the warm buzz and crack of each record… Pure magic.”

“I credit my parents for planting the seeds of my love of music. My parents have 12 years between them so I benefit from growing up with a wide range of musical influences. My father introduced me to the ’60s and ’70s soul legends like Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, Wilson Pickett, Millie Jackson, Aretha Franklin, and LTD. My mother introduced me to ’80s and ’90s pop and R&B from the likes of Michael Jackson, En Vogue, SWV, Tina Turner, and Mary J. Blige to name a few. This set the foundation for my taste in music.

When it comes the pursuit of vinyl, for me, it’s all about the hunt. I love the journey to procuring my favorite records just as much as I love having them in my collection. Each one tells a story. My favorite records to hunt for are mid ’90s/early 2000s pop and R&B. This music was the soundtrack of my adolescence and my first forays into developing my own musical taste. These records are particularly hard to find because at this point they were not being mass produced on vinyl in the USA.

Here’s a pro-tip, you can often find either European presses of these records or special versions that were serviced to DJs for the club scene. When you find one of these gems, the scarcity of these records makes acquisition that much more satisfying. Some of my favorites that I have acquired are an original European pressing of Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope, the Buffy The Vampire Slayer soundtrack (from the 1992 cult classic film), Jill Scott’s Who Is Jill Scott, Beyoncé’s solo debut Dangerously In Love, and Craig David’s Born to Do It.

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“Early on in high school, I had this really strict, borderline obsessive routine, where I would come home, immediately record the day’s musical ideas on my cassette four-track (remember those?), and then I’d work out to clear my head. As every aspect of my life needed to connect to music in those days, I’d choose a vinyl from my dad’s old record collection (a pretty extensive one at that), and then I’d throw it on our decrepit record player with one of the speakers sort of blown out. Really not the picture of high fidelity, but there was something satisfying about the amount of physical steps required to hear the music. There was an investment.”

“I mostly listened to the music I had known for the majority of my young life, the records I was comfortable with, but as much as I loved the White Album and The Supremes, I was running out of the old material. One day, out of curiosity, I picked out a record purely based on the cover: there was a gaunt guy leaning into the frame, like a vaguely handsome Count Dracula, with slicked back hair. I put it on, and the first, like, ten minutes of the track consisted of a train sound, followed by a seemingly endless groove that just kept building in tension. As this went on, an eerily enjoyable creeping anxiety came with it like something big was bound to happen. I stopped working out and I was just standing and staring at the one good speaker.

And then David Bowie’s voice rang out and changed my life. The song mutated into this paranoid disco sound, and I think I was frozen, mouth agape, for the full ten minutes of the track. As soon as it was finished, I picked up the needle and set it back, and then sat down in front of the speaker. I didn’t even get to the second song for quite a bit (and then the second track turned out to be the space funk of “Golden Years,” so it was just all over for me).

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“Since I was a kid, I have been drawn to music. The way I could feel it move through my whole body. The way it could re-shape my brain waves. The way it connected me to the people in the room who I was listening with. Music, I later learned, was one of the few things in life that delivers a ‘complete’ experience.”

“I’ve been on board with Spotify from very early on. Streaming is easy and the collection might as well be infinite. I was a regular user right away. I am grateful for it, as a listener and as a working musician. But for all of the convenience that streaming offers, a complete musical experience it is not. Unlike vinyl, it’s a bit like listening in one dimension.

My experience of music, from a really young age, was largely visual. As a kid, I’d lay on the floor and stare at album art for the duration of an entire album. I’d read every lyric and every word of every liner note. I became familiar with the names of the producers and engineers. I’d inspect and analyze every photograph as if there were some mystery in there to be solved or unlocked, about the music, about the artist, about everything. The music was all magic to me. A big mystery. The.Big.Mystery. It was clear to me that in the music there were answers. Whether I could find them or not, was clear to me that I’d gladly spend the rest of my life looking for them and listening.

My parents had a strange and eclectic collection of vinyl. I remember sitting way too close to giant speakers in the living room, when I was probably 5 years old, completely engulfed by Barry Manilow’s silk voice, looking at his giant face on the cover, bigger than mine, and thinking he looked a lot like my dad and that he was probably someone I could trust.

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“The feeling of accomplishment I experienced after dropping the needle down onto my finished record for the first time was wildly incomparable to what I felt listening to it digitally. From the very moment I peeled the plastic off, I felt like I was at the beginning of some kind of ritualistic experience of “closure” in my life. The end of the greatest chapter was being marked by the closing track, sliding the record back into its sleeve and finding a place for it on the shelf amongst the rest of my collection.”

“After pouring so much labour, love and life into the music, I think it’s the ongoing interaction needed to listen to a record—the artwork size, the heft, the substance—that makes it feel like a more cathartic finish line. I’m not going to lie, though: How a round piece of plastic can be transformed into music is still one of life’s most enchanting mysteries to me. Of course I know how it works, but the fact that it works at all feels like magic and definitely contributes to my emotional response.

The sentimentalism I feel about vinyl is also hugely influenced by my fathers’ own relationship with and reverence for records. He’s an audiophile and his large collection of hi-fi magazines and stereo equipment was and continues to be the butt of many jokes in our family. I’ve known for my whole life that music moves me in a way most things don’t—but I was about 11 when I started really listening to music on my own and developing my taste independent of what my older sisters and parents were listening to.

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“My dad was the collector.”

“I have been obsessed with music for about as long as I have had any kind of awareness. Records are as much a part of my childhood as the Muppets or Transformers. My dad was a guitar player first, a music journalist second, then a pioneer of music video production in the 1980s and ’90s. So by the time I was born, the house was basically wall to wall with vinyl. He had everything… and I mean everything. I grew up with Spotify before there was Spotify.

As I discovered music, I would just move through bands and genres almost chronologically. Chuck Berry to The Beatles and Stones, Zeppelin and The Who, Dylan and Derek and the Dominoes. And as I got to high school, Miles, Coltrane, and Chick Corea.

The obscure finds were the most rewarding. If I wanted to dig into drummer Steve Gadd’s deeper catalog of session recordings, I could almost always find that random album I had read about somewhere.

There were no greatest hits records. Just full collections of original albums. I had no sense of which songs were famous… I just knew what I liked. And of course, the artwork and liner notes were such a part of the experience.

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“My Mum singing hymns: ‘Ri-ise and shi-ine and give God his glory glory!’ and Brotherhood of Man’s “Save All Your Kisses for Me” high volume, definitely hitting the notes—with such off-the-scale enthusiasm that no-one could ever have questioned her commitment to the theme.”

“My Dad on the other hand, a real crooner. Elvis’ “Love Me Tender” at bedtime remains my most evocative musical memory from childhood. He told me Elvis Presley was the unrivalled King of Rock and Roll and I totally thought it was an official title, and then after Elvis’s death was reported, having given it some thought and in all seriousness, he told me that the new King of Rock and Roll was… probably David Essex. I of course immediately informed all my friends of this latest development in Rock and Roll royalty.”

So though my parents weren’t really ‘culture vultures’ and there was not much in the way of vinyl in the house there was a kind of ‘music as celebration’ vibe going on, and my parent’s vocalisations were on the whole pretty adept, even possibly beautiful. Anyway, there was also a piano that went largely untouched (till I was about 10) but most crucially there were two older sisters and it is to them that I owe a debt of gratitude in that they introduced me to ‘pop’ and ‘rock’ music very early on, which at the time would have been regarded as ‘alternative’ or even ‘esoteric’ and was certainly a real eye-opener to me.

Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Lou Reed, Roxy Music, Iggy Pop… I didn’t know anything about these acts or artists in truth, but there was a steady supply of fascinating music coming from my sisters’ bedroom and I definitely wanted to get involved. I remember buying my first single, Kraftwerk’s “The Model” on 7” (with guidance from older sister obvs—as I was like 9) and thinking it was the boldest thing I had ever done and feeling pretty sophisticated and hip.

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“In the ’80s and early ’90s in rural Missouri, vinyl was as prevalent as cornfields. Not because it was cool to have a record player, but because things were just far enough behind the times that everyone still had one in their house.”

“I grew up listening on a Sears Roebuck bookshelf unit that was given to my parents as a wedding gift. They still have it, and it still works 40 years later. The first song I remember hearing on vinyl was “Baby’s Got Her Blue Jeans On” by Mel McDaniel. I still remember the little house we lived in at the time, the player sitting on a shelf under the TV. I sat on the shag carpet in front of the record player in awe, singing along and yelling for my mom to come start the song over every few minutes.

My parents’ record collection was small. My mom loved the Carpenters and Captain & Tennille. My dad had a copy of Pretzel Logic that I remember digging into because I thought the cover photo was interesting, and “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” was catchy enough to draw me in. I think it’s safe to say my parents’ collection mostly consisted of popular music at the time. We moved out of that small house, into a 14 bedroom Victorian fixer-upper in the center of my small town. We lived upstairs, and my mom opened an antique shop in the lower level. This period of time sparked my interest in being a collector.

At this time, a lot of people in the city were beginning their fascination with vinyl by flipping through alphabetized shelves at hip record shops. The closest such shop was an hour or two away from my town. In a town like mine, it seemed like every weekend there were at least a few people having a yard sale or estate auction.

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“Just found “It’s Called A Heart,” Depeche Mode, Extended 12 when I was going through my records. It is just so good. After spending years traveling and moving around, I was often away from my records. Finally today I put on my remastered Depeche reissue of Music For The Masses. The band is just brilliant. Back in the day, I used to make mixes burned to CD, or minidisc—to listen to while driving or flying, or walking around the city when I lived in NYC. With a record on, turned up, it fills the air with a kind of warmth that is divine; you can breathe in the sound, exist on it.”

“When I was first learning guitar and music theory, I would spend hours in record stores—I remember one apartment when I didn’t have any furniture, but I had records! It was just that important to me to build my collection. I think musicians understand that. You needed more than the CD or Spotify—you need the vinyl. Vinyl is a kind of deathless thing, a spiritual experience of deep listening. It also gets you into the album itself, rather than just repeating certain songs you love. But when that favorite song comes on and it’s vinyl, the way you dance is different. It’s about the pure aesthetic experience of the art, about loving life, going into a range of emotions. I’m so grateful to slow down and just be with my music.

Before the quarantine one day I was getting ready to go out and looking through my vinyl, I put on the “Together” 12” by the London Suede from Sci-Fi Lullabies, a collection of b-sides from their first album. That release probably had the most significant impact on me as a musician. I will never forget hearing Bernard Butler’s and Richard Oakes’ guitar tones (each with their own voice and style) and the falsetto of Brett Anderson’s voice when I discovered that band. It was life changing in a transcendent way. Brett’s lyrics are so artful, mystically poetic. I have a vivid memory of being 19, driving on the 101 in California, listening to that CD. Later I began collecting all the vinyl I could get from them, before all the reissues. Still have it after years of traveling around.

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“In the fall of my junior year in high school, I was briefly suspended from a NYC based ‘City-As-School’ immersive, experiential education program that I was attending. A teacher had walked abruptly into my non-coed dorm room, discovering a very alarmed 16-year-old version of me, in bed, with 4 feet sticking out from the bottom of the blankets.”

“While it was the worst possible way to be introduced to my girlfriend’s parents, the upshot was that I spent a handful of days with some old family friends in Brooklyn. The older son had just gotten into scratching and juggling records. As someone who was already quite obsessed with making music and dancing (a drummer, guitarist, noodler on the bass, and B-boy wannabe), seeing what my friend was doing with vinyl cracked my head wide open. This was 1998. ATCQ’s “The Love Movement” had just come out, but I was still swearing by my Beats, Rhymes and Life CD, which wound its way up through my Sony Walkman’s headphone cables on repeat, tapping directly into my endorphin receptors, transporting me to a near ecstatic state regularly while riding the 4, 5, 6 line.

After that firsthand glimpse of how hip hop records were actually conceived—the sampling, looping, scratching and manipulating of doubles—I was transfixed. A handful of months later, I acquired the very same used Gemini belt-drive turntables and mixer from this Brooklyn friend, and brought them to Marin County in northern California where I would later go on to finish High School.

Of course, the obvious next step was finding records. I raided my mom’s collection, but the funkiest things she had were LPs by Nina Simone, Sam & Dave, and a couple of South African Jive albums which I still cherish to this day. These weren’t gonna help me learn to juggle or scratch though. With no other friends who DJ’d or collected records, I hardly knew where to begin. For you young bloods out there, keep in mind that Youtube didn’t exist, Shazam didn’t exist, the now ubiquitous “DJ Academy” didn’t exist, my internet connected via a modem that made funny sounds and we were still using America Online CDs that came in the mail to get 100 hours of internet. This wasn’t something I could look up at the local library. I was, however, divinely in luck.

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“Playing a record is a ritual. Running your fingers along your collection (which you recently alphabetised by artist), pulling out a record and going over the track-listing in your head before taking it out of the sleeve and placing it on the turntable. You put the empty sleeve against the shelf, drop the needle and wait…”

“BOOM! There is sound! There is colour! There are memories…teenage angst, long summers, first joint, first times, everlasting, eternal life and lust and love all on one 12 inch vinyl that spins…and spins…and spins until you tell it to stop.

For us there is no better way to listen to our favourite music. Sarah’s music taste was shaped by listening to her Dad’s record collection when she was a young girl. Johnny Cash, Fleetwood Mac, Neil Young, The Rolling Stones etc—all music that was originally mastered and pressed for vinyl. As kids we both grew up in the ’90s and we’ve reacquired most of the stuff we bought on CD in vinyl form.

There is also a duty of care you take on as you build your record collection. You learn the importance of keeping them in as good a condition as possible, putting them away when you’re done listening and keeping them in the sleeve until the next time.

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“Having grown up on CDs with no family records to inherit, my love for vinyl sparked in my late teens, when I moved to London from Greece. I found myself digging through record stores in Soho, in awe of the amount of different music available to purchase, and so I was hooked on discovery. I spent my early years exploring my parents’ CD collection, creating my own amalgamations of what I considered to be the best mixtapes ever made… ignorance is bliss!”

“I grew up with a love for the likes of Tracy Chapman, Nina Simone, Toni Braxton, Erykah Badu, Alicia Keys, Ms Lauryn Hill, and Mary J. Blige who would blare out of my parents’ speakers on a daily basis. The common denominator for a lot of my favourite childhood music was clearly female singers playing the piano. I learned the piano from the age of 7, leading me into a career of songwriting and singing—and I can only thank all the amazing female voices I heard everyday, giving me the confidence to pursue writing and performing music myself.

When I first arrived in London, I remember going to see James Blake live one night and needing to buy something at the end of the gig as a memento. The way the sound traveled through the venue, especially that of the piano, gave me chills and I needed something to remember that feeling with. I distinctly recall looking at the vinyl at the merch stand and the excitement of taking it home for its first spin—this purchase marked the beginning of my vinyl journey.

My record player came shortly after, and I immediately became obsessed with the way the mechanism works, going back and forth to Soho, adding a new record or two each time I got paid. The needle fascinated me and to this day, I sit in awe of the way the sound is created, the way it travels through the air, and the texture of the sound we hear. Whenever I come back from a gig, it’s with vinyl in hand. I will stick it on as soon as I’m home and relive the magic.

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