“I grew up in Foster City, California. It’s kind of like Legoland there—an aggressively suburban neighborhood built around the San Francisco Bay.”
“My parents ran a tight ship. There was always smooth jazz playing. David Benoit. John Tesh. Our white carpet remained white for years. There wasn’t really any recorded music around. My parents weren’t ‘cool.’ They just had KOIT on all the time. Lite rock, less talk.
I think for this reason I didn’t really encounter vinyl until I was about 13, when I bought a limited run Starchildren 7” at Tower Records in San Mateo. Starchildren was Billy Corgan’s side project. There was a Joy Division cover on the B-side, which is probably how I ever heard of Joy Division. I was the biggest Smashing Pumpkins fan ever. I didn’t even have a record player and that thing sat on my shelf until I sold it on Ebay for $70 sometime during the early 2000s.
It wasn’t until I started working at Lou’s Records in Encinitas that I started collecting vinyl in earnest. I was in college and living behind the store with my friend Tanya. Actually, Tanya worked at the store too, and we spent all of our time bingeing on obscure classic rock LPs by bands like Blue Cheer, Bubble Puppy, Mott the Hoople, and Lord Baltimore.
I think I played Love’s Forever Changes until I was blue in the face. Back in those days, Lou’s Records had an entire building dedicated to used vinyl and I probably amassed an absurd amount of vinyl (starting with the entire Neil Young catalog) before I finished college and dumped the entire collection back in Foster City, where I think my mom actually listens to some of it occasionally.”
—Jessica Numsuwankijkul
Heliotropes’ second full-length album, Over There That Way arrives in stores July 15, 2016 via The End Records.
