“I fucking love vinyl.”
“The first record I ever bought was ABBA’s eponymously titled album. I was 14 and I listened, enraptured, to ‘Mama Mia’ over and over and over again. Now I have a bigger collection of albums that I listen to on my little Crosley suitcase-record player. It’s been with me for the past five years and it turns every space I’m in into a home. I don’t like to listen to MP3s—they’ll do in a pinch if I need something fast, but they don’t feed my soul the way a vinyl record does. Music sounds different on vinyl; more alive, more present, more sacred. More real. With vinyl, the act of putting on a record becomes an interaction instead of a one-way kind of consumption.
When I have it my way, vinyl is all that I have. It’s more of an effort to get the music I want on vinyl, and it takes more time, but there’s also that element of finding music that you didn’t even know you needed. I always look through the bins at secondhand stores and garage sales. For some reason, there are always ten times more Johnny Mathis records than any other in those bins. Can someone tell me why? I have a few, just because it seems like a prerequisite to a record collection. And I feel bad for all of the orphaned Johnny Mathis records. They’re great.
My favorites have stayed the same for a long time. I add a new one into the heavy rotation every now and then, but the core population is pretty unchanged. There’s Cat Stevens, Elliott Smith, Kishi Bashi, Joni Mitchell. But I’m not going to lie, most of it is ABBA. I love ABBA, and it specifically sounds better on vinyl. It’s a hair faster I think.
Maybe it ties back to that first album I ever bought. I guess I can’t get enough. I’m still a sucker for ‘Mama Mia.’”
—Jackie McLean
Jackie McLean’s self-titled debut EP under the name Roan Yellowthorn is in stores now.
