“Growing up my parents had kept a very curated sense of art, music, and books in our house that I was exposed to. My mother was always playing Jim Croce or Simon and Garfunkel or James Taylor. My dad was always singing and playing his guitar, and I was raised with all these older sounds and flavors.”
“We spent a lot of weekends in antique stores looking at collectibles, and items from the past. When I was little it bored me, but over time, it became this thing I absorbed and couldn’t shake off. I was young but I was beginning to develop old tastes and sensibilities and style from a totally different time period.
I remember I started collecting vinyl before I even had a record player. I could get them for cheap growing up, 30 cents, sometimes a nickel, because everybody was getting rid of them back then. The CD was the future. I’d lay on the floor and read their liner notes and big/ giant photographs.
One year my father surprised my mother on her birthday with a giant gramophone, one of the beautiful, old-fashioned antiques with the wooden box and a big brass horn and a crank. I remember her winding the arm, and dropping the needle and Billie Holiday’s velvet voice came on, “I’ll Be Seeing You,” and that was it. No one had to convince of the magic of vinyl.
Many years later, a boy came over to the house, and he had a suitcase in his hands. He came into my bedroom, plugged it into the wall, and picked up my For The Roses album and put the needle down. All the sudden Joni was right there singing. I spent the next few years (until that record player broke) next to that outlet on the floor listening to Déjà vu or Nashville Skyline and Harvest Moon and Abbey Road, completely re-experiencing all the music I’d already known in the privacy of my bedroom.
There is something so different about listening to vinyl. It requires a readiness to sit there and listen, to be present enough to flip it over to hear the other side. To give up your life for thirty or forty minutes and really think about what that artist spent all this time and effort trying to tell you. That’s how I want to experience music. I think vinyl is how music is meant to be heard: With your eyes closed, on the floor, while goosebumps blossom on your skin.”
—Ashley Sofia
Shades of Blue, the sophomore album from Ashley Sofia, arrives in stores September 6, 2019.
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