PHOTOS: DOUG SEYMOUR | “My favorite thing in the world is a vinyl record. My second favorite thing in the world is talking ad nauseam about said vinyl record. Perhaps this will be less like a first date and more like being locked in a room with me at a party on some sort of upper, and you just made the enormous mistake of asking me how I feel about Astral Weeks. Hold onto your hats.”
“I knew that I was obsessive when I was little. I could tell the way other kids looked at me strangely when I got going on some conversational tear about nothing—they were not amused or enthused. But for the first several years of my life, I had nowhere to direct this behavior, so I just figured I was a freak or a psycho killer or something.
When I was ten, the movie adaptation of High Fidelity came out and I immediately realized that these guys were my long-lost friends. It would be me—age 10, John Cusack, Jack Black, and the other guy who looks like Michael Stipe. This would be my crew. We would talk about our top 5 records to listen to while on a date, even though I had never been on one. We would go for drinks after work and complain about stuff I would be secretly happy to be complaining about. We would make people feel bad about their shitty opinions. This was the dream.
I only had two problems here: first, these were fictional characters. Second, I was entering the fifth grade and making friends was not my forte. So I did what any of us does when we have an extra decade or so to kill; I built up my record collection, and then, I organized it.
Somewhere in the midst of these ten years, I developed a knack for writing songs and recording them. In the later part of the 2000s, vinyl came back into the cultural vernacular as a novelty item for people who shopped at the newly opened store, Urban Outfitters (not hating) and the aesthetic was set. And by the time I set foot in my twenties, my vinyl collection was something people might see as a positive character attribute, as the cargo shorts and compact discs of our youth faded off into the sunset.
Nowadays, my collection does not qualify me as even close to a rarity here in New York City. But I really don’t care. It’s nice to have an abundance of record stores to hang out in and friends who are interested in the same things. I don’t get sour about the novel becoming mainstream; it’s a good thing. But I’ll always sort of be that ten-year old, locked in his room, with his dad’s original copy of Loaded, hoping someday to be or feel cool.
I sit here writing this next to 1000 copies of my new record Selling Things, a work I’m incredibly proud of that is also currently taking up most of the space in my dining room. I hope people find this record, or it finds them. I hope someday a 10-year-old kid finds his dad’s copy. I hope it makes him feel cool.”
—Brian Dunne
Selling Things, the new full-length release from Brian Dunne, is in stores now—on vinyl.
Enter to win Selling Things on vinyl by citing in the comments below the very first record you’ve owned that made you feel, well… cool. We’ll choose one winner for a copy of the LP a week from today, April 28, 2020. Our winner will be notified directly via email.
