“Music has always been playing in my head. I can’t remember a time when there wasn’t a song playing in between my ears.”
“When I was four I was in my first show. I remember asking… begging… pretty much demanding that I take some acting classes. I went up to my parents and told them that I wanted to sing. I was in my first show and I remember being on stage and thinking, wow here I am… I’m home. Everyone always asked me if I got nervous and I always looked at them funny because I thought that was a silly question. That was like asking someone if they’re nervous when they’re in their living room watching TV… are you nervous in your safe space? What an unusual question I thought.
From that day on I was always on the stage, always performing, always memorizing lines, always learning new songs. I was always in a production from the age of 4 to the age of 18 because that’s where I wanted to be. I would walk around singing and perform shows for my parents in the kitchen. I watched endless musicals and learned every bit of music that I could. I remember when I had my Discman, the first CD that I got was Avril Lavigne’s Let Go. I was 8 years old and had just been diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. I was in the hospital for a few days and my parents bought me that CD to keep me company.
I listened to it twice before I knew the words to very song on the album. I remember my parents going home to get some sleep and coming back in the morning and being so confused why I asked for a new CD. They were like uhh… Carrie… we just got you that one. I was like uhhh… I know… But I already know all the words to all of the songs. They laughed this time rather than being confused. I had already been in musical theatre for 4 years now and they had grown accustomed to my weird sponge brain.
I had my Discman everywhere I went. It wasn’t until I was 15 years old and my grandfather passed away that I had my first vinyl. I remember going with my mom and my aunts to clean out his apartment and my cousins and I going through boxes of things in the living room to decide what we each wanted to keep.
I was pretty confused when nobody fought me on the collection of records that I found in one of the boxes. It truly had everything in there from country to Elvis to classic jazz. I was very disappointed when I took my collection home to find out that my parents did not have a record player for me to play the vinyl on. I was essentially like, huh? You’re old people… You don’t own a record player? I don’t think they liked that very much.
I continued to grow my record collection and add to my grandfather’s choices over the years. I’m not sure why I did because I truly had no way of listening to the music because I didn’t have a player at the time. It wasn’t until I moved out when I was 18 and had my own place for the first time that I invested in my very own record player.
I was disappointed to find that a lot of his records were scratched and I couldn’t listen to most of them the whole way through. That was okay though, I liked the fact that I had them to begin with. I ended up making a cool wall in my room of all of the covers to his records above my bed in my freshman year dorm at NYU. Here’s a picture of it:
I still love to listen to music on vinyl. My collection has continued to expand and I have a record player on my nightstand currently. I generally listen to music before bed on my record player because I find something soothing about it. There is this quality of the music that really sits with me and brings this sense of nostalgia to my heart. I listen to my Bruce Springsteen Born To Run album the most because the combination of my Jersey Pride for Bruce and the feeling that listening to vinyl gives me really sends me home every time. I love listening to some of my favorite current artists on there as well. I spin the 1975 self titled album and Arctic Monkeys’ AM a lot too.
I want to take my single “If I Can’t Be with You” along with my upcoming album California Freaks and put it on vinyl because I think the nature of my music lends itself to storytelling. When you listen to an album on vinyl from start to finish, it takes you on a journey. I tell a lot of love stories, but the real ones—not the Disney ones. I tell stories about loving someone more than they love you and having three glasses too many of whisky and calling your ex.
I want someone to lay in their bed at night and listen to my album and have it take them to another place the same way I have done with some of my favorite albums.”
—Carrie Lane
