“Music was so much more fragile and coveted when it was just in a tangible form. There was fear of scratching a CD you worked hard to pay for, or unraveling a cassette, or even breaking a vinyl. You would display your rack of CDs or frame your vinyl, like there was a certain pride in the music you listened to. I think that’s why to this day there is so much support of tangible records and why it will never fully die. There is a certain nostalgia to holding a record somebody worked so hard for, not just a link. It’s where music and sound meet body and soul.”
“Growing up, my Aunt had this beautiful farm about 45 minutes out of my hometown, and in one of her rooms, she had this red record player and stacks of records she had collected over the years. I used to love to just pick a random one, put it on, and dance until it stopped, beg my mom to flip it for me, and then dance again. It was great, and at that age I didn’t really realise how special records and vinyl were and still are, obviously.
As I grew up, I listened to lots of cassettes and CDs as my dad had this incredible collection of them in our basement. Great bands like Deee-Lite, Pat Metheny, Salt-N-Pepa, Enya, and Art of Noise. I got cultured by lots of bangin’ ’90s records and artists. By the time I became a young adult around 15, my dad opened the door into the ’80s for me and that was a game changer. I was the only kid requesting Tears for Fears and Bowie at parties. When Spotify kind of started to take over, I got into a lot of ’80s groups as Spotify basically did all of the work for me. I’d listen to Howard Jones, and there it was “Fans also like… Thompson Twins, Wang Chung, Berlin, and Flock of Seagulls.”
When I was in late high school, I joined a couple other classmates on a trip to Mexico to work on building a water well and just offer a helping hand to a community that needed it. We had a group leader that would pick a specific album to listen to the entire trip and during our year it happened to be a cassette from 1971 titled Tom Jones Sings She’s a Lady. That album left a huge imprint on me and even now when I listen to it, I can smell the hot sweaty van we’d drive in to and from the places we visited and can taste the fresh mango we pulled off the trees from around our apartment.
I remember getting home and visiting my aunt who had the red record player setup, and there sitting on the bottom shelf, covered in dust, was Tom Jones. I sat in her living room the whole night laying on the floor just soaking in the songs I knew front and back. That’s when I started to collect my records. I started to hit up every Value Village, second hand store or cheap little record shop to find whatever I could. I started to rack up this little collection. I had Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, Elton John, Supertramp… the classics.
My collection is still growing and I’m constantly looking for whatever obscure record I can lay my grubby paws on. And while I obviously still stream lots of music, it’s just a necessary evil, I still love to throw on a crappy 2 dollar Walmart CD in my car or drive out to my Aunt’s to relish in her tasty collection of vintage records—and I don’t think that will ever change.”
—Madison Olds
“Best Part of Me,” the new single from Madison Olds is in stores now.
Madison Olds Official | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter
PHOTO: KAYLEE SMOKE
