“Unlike a lot of people my age, my parents didn’t have a vinyl collection to pass down to me. It wasn’t because my parents aren’t cool—they actually really are. They got me into a lot of cool stuff when I was younger, like David Bowie, Billie Holiday, The Clash, and The Cure. My parents lost their entire vinyl collection due to water damage from the 1994 Northridge Earthquake.”
“I was lucky enough to inherit a gargantuan collection of CDs, even if none of the CDs were in the right boxes. I would sit for hours listening to them as I would try to carefully put them back in their rightful boxes. I passed so much time when I was 11 listening to Fiona Apple’s When the Pawn… at full volume on my Walkman. When I was around 10, I did a project for my music class on David Bowie, and I remembered the laughter from my classmates when I played “Lady Stardust”—“they stared/ at the makeup on his face.” Bowie was supposed to be an outsider, and my classmates didn’t realize they fell right into his trap.
Fast-forward to high school, and Urban Outfitters was starting to sell record players. Never mind the source, record players had never been accessible to me. I decided that since I wanted to start buying records, I had to save up my allowance to buy a record player. In about a month I had enough money, so I finally bought one. I then immediately drove to Amoeba to buy some records. I’m pretty sure the first record I bought was self-titled record by The Velvet Underground & Nico. I was so excited to peel back the shrink-wrap and lay the needle down on the record. The initial crackling of the record player sent shivers down my spine. It was a night I certainly will never forget.
Records have a magical way of finding you. I came home from school one day and walked into the garage of my apartment building to find 3 boxes that had just been left out there for the taking. As I got closer, I realized that each box was overflowing with records. In my excitement, I sat down right on the pavement and started digging for what I could take with me.
After an hour of inhaling dust and gasoline fumes from the cars nearby, I went upstairs, my arms cradling more records than I could carry. I still have all of these records in my collection. From The Beatles’ Revolver to Barbra Streisand’s The Way We Were to Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, they all get played in heavy rotation. It was a great coincidence to find all those records that day in 2010, and even though my parents never had records to give to me, this event more than made up for it.”
—Soraya Sebghati
Night Talks’ debut album, In Dreams is in stores now.
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