“I’m alphabetizing my record collection.”
“This means monopolizing the living room floor with stacks laid out in a chaotic miniature skyline, the urban planning of a madwoman. A bowl of popcorn, handwritten sticky labels and a Sharpie populate the streets of this makeshift megalopolis. Sweet men chatting on the sofa tip-toe through my record heaps when making trips to the kitchen for more snacks. It feels familiar, ritualistic, and focused… all that vinyl embodies for me.
This reorganization is shaping up to be a long night. Would filing by genre be the superior formula? Too late now. I’ve painted myself into a corner, stranded in the middle of a township I rashly built in the spent embers of a Friday dusk. Taking each album into my hands, I consider its origin. Time capsules like these recall the vanities of adolescence, the giddiness of long-lost intoxications and the creak of derailed lust. They reanimate ideas hidden away in storage.
Putting on a crackled pressing of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons spirits me back into the terrycloth robed arms of my mother in her rocking chair after wrapping another weary shift at Toronto’s Wellesley Hospital in 1986. She would die three years later, but hearing the same warm, effusive strains captured on vinyl brings her back into near-tangibility. I remember waiting until she was busy cleaning her records before furtively poking at the bird logo affixed to the acoustic fabric of her Fisher speakers.
Hours slip by. My poor man’s Dewey Decimal System firms up. Look at the little lettered flaps sticking triumphantly out from my record shelves! I gaze at the remaining ‘miscellaneous’ jumble- those albums that defy classification.
Am I undermining compilations like Canada’s Rockin’ on the Airwaves (featuring Rough Trade’s “High School Confidential”) or a ’70s Trinidadian steel band by relegating them to some vague offshoot category rather than filing them under their respective letters, or will it give them a chance to shine in their own right? These are luxurious struggles in a world turned on its head. The thought of music surviving the messes we make is reassuring.
Sometimes that unwieldy dismantling of the past is just what we need to remind ourselves that innocence still is afoot.”
—Joanie Wolkoff
Her Habits’ debut EP, “Northerner” is available on 1/27.
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