“I got into vinyl late in the game. I was 28 years old and living alone for the first time in my life. My apartment was beautifully empty, and one of the first things to take up space was an old record player.”
“When I purchased the machine I grabbed 2 or 3 LPs to go along with it, but don’t recall their titles. I knew my father had well over a thousand records, lining five tall shelves in his junk-room, back home on Quadra Island. Upon my next visit, I planned to scour. It was a good haul. I left with 40 or 50 records, one of which was a long time favorite, The Byrds’ Sweetheart of The Rodeo.
I thanked my father for his generosity, and made special mention of the cosmic-cowboy classic, holding it up to unveil the sweetheart herself, a western heroine framed in a flower wreath–a beautiful album cover. As it turns out it was a different sweetheart altogether who originally gifted the LP to my father: his high school sweetheart—and my mother. It was a wedding present and although not an auspicious one, a very sweet one indeed, and one that would later bring their youngest son much joy in his sparse apartment.
To the point of cliché, one of the medium’s most beloved traits is its tangibility—the holding and the feeling of the thing itself, giving way to an intimate and personal experience. And when a thing is second-hand, like a record so often is, the beauty–and sometimes the bane (depending on its condition)—is it having been touched before. This quality of ancestry entombed in the wax invites one to handle with care and ceremony, while also providing an opportunity to flex the imagination.
I like to make up stories around my used records, and not because Dark Side of The Moon isn’t phenomenal by itself, but because it actually sounds a little better when you imagine the same lost souls spinning in a different fish bowl (or empty apartment) some thirty-odd years earlier. Just try to tell me one of those dusty saucers spilling off the racks at a flea market wasn’t hurled from a window alongside dirty jeans and the kitchen sink by the hand of some fuming, jilted lover. The thing is you can’t, not with any great certainty, but you’re meant to, with great mystery.
As for Sweetheart of The Rodeo, it’s less about fantasy, but rather personal sacrament. When I unsheathe that particular disc of resin and plastic, I step through a portal to arrive as a fly on the wall of my parents’ innocence. I’m granted access to the bones and marrow of my origins. What a gift. And all to the sound of Gram Parsons’ terrible and perfect singing voice.”
—Ryan Guldemond
Mother Mother’s brand new full-length release No Culture arrives in stores this Friday, February 10, 2017—on vinyl.
