“I did not own a record player until I was about 25. I grew up listening to CDs, often one album (and sometimes one song) over and over and over and over again until I knew every little lilt.”
“When digital music became the thing, I started making playlists on my computer because it was easy to do. But, I’m grateful to have grown up back when one’s attention span was not turned off by the idea of listening to just one artist for 30-45 minutes. My attention span has probably diminished now that so much variety is available, it somehow seems like more of a challenge. And that to me is a big reason that vinyl is so important. Listening to records is for me to centre myself, stay still, play out a mood, and of course, have a little reverence for what an artist is trying to say or play as opposed to just listening to the hit(s) and never really digging into the catalogue.
I first got into records when I started hanging around a store called Flash and Crash in the annex in Toronto, which is gone now but was the beginning of my love for vinyl. I ended up living with one of the guys who worked there, and he has an encyclopedic knowledge of 20th century music. He’d been working in record stores all around Toronto for year. For Christmas one year I alphabetized his record collection and it took 5 whole days, just to give you an idea of the span and size of music.
He would put a record on in the morning and I would wake up to something I’d never heard before, a lot of things that have now become my favourite stuff to listen to. Examples of this are Johnny Guitar Watson, Fred Neil, and Brenton Wood. I’m big on soul albums, even the cheesier songs. I love hearing whole albums and being able to pick up which ones were designed to be hits and which ones ended up being the hits and daydreaming about what it must have been like to be in those studios.
Mainly I collect soul and jazz records now. I don’t mind listening to things digitally that were created in the digital age. But there’s something about listening to records that were recorded with an intention of being listened to in their entirety. So now my collection is a lot of Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, Fats Waller, Lester Young, Monk, Hampton Hawes, Count Basie, Earl Hines, the list goes on. I’m a big jazz fan. My dad plays sax and raised me on it, so it all reminds me of falling asleep on the couch in a club when I was a kid.
I think the main reason I love vinyl is because it still feels magic. CDs were magic for a while but their moment seems to have come and gone. It’s pretty cool watching the digital age progress, but you can’t hold it in your hand. It’s not as much of a real thing. But there’s a timelessness about wax. It’s definitely the most magical malleable form of melody, in my humble opinion.”
—Emilie Mover
Emilie Mover’s full length release, Night Owl arrives in stores on June 5, 2018.
