“I’m old enough to remember getting my first record player one Christmas when I was around five years old. It was a Mickey Mouse record player. It came in a white plastic case, kind of like a typewriter case (I’m old enough to remember those, too), and on the inside of the lid, which had a little speaker built into it, was Mickey Mouse.”
“Mickey Mouse’s arm was the arm of the record player, and the stylus protruded from the tip of his white-gloved index finger …. I’d sit cross-legged on the floor next to it, listening to my mother’s Beatles LPs over and over again, leafing through the Magical Mystery Tour booklet and pondering the significance of the lyrics.
My mother also had a sizeable collection of folk music albums—many of them on the Smithsonian Folkways label—that were a bit smaller than a standard LP and were made of really thick, heavy vinyl. I think I liked the look and feel of those as much as or more than the music itself. They had wonderfully serious titles like American Folk Songs And Ballads and Blues, Volume 1.
As I got older I acquired a proper stereo and turntable, minus Mickey Mouse, and started haunting used record stores and buying anything that looked halfway interesting. I remember buying a secondhand copy of the Country Joe And The Fish album I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die and being thrilled to discover the hidden tracks.
Then CDs came along, but even though I didn’t always have a turntable, I hung on to my vinyl collection through moves from the USA to Ireland and from Ireland to England. My motivation for keeping those old vinyl records was chiefly based on nostalgia and sentiment, but then a couple of years ago I happened to post a wistful comment on Facebook about wishing I had a turntable, and promptly got a message from a fan saying he had one he wasn’t using and was happy to send it to me (I’ve since tried posting wistful comments on Facebook about wishing I had a new car and a bigger house, but no joy).
When that turntable arrived and I started listening to my old records on it, it was a revelation—there was a warmth and depth in the sound that I still feel is missing from the copies I have on CD of the same albums, and there’s something about the whole process of having to get up and turn the record over halfway through that makes you pay attention more, somehow: listening to an album becomes an activity, rather than something that just happens in the background.
I’d love to be able to release my own albums on vinyl—especially the new one, Walking Into White. I did actually investigate the possibility of a vinyl release when we were still at the mastering stage, but sadly I couldn’t afford it: both the additional mastering for vinyl and the manufacturing would have added way too much to my costs. If I ever manage to get out of debt, I’d love to do a vinyl re-release of it! Every time I look at another artist’s merch table and see vinyl there, I feel a little surge of envy.
In the meantime, I’ll keep listening to that well-travelled collection of mine, and I’m very glad that thanks to vinyl’s recent growth in popularity, I now have a lot more opportunity to add to it than I’d have had ten or even twenty years ago. Long may it last!”
—Sarah McQuaid
Sarah McQuaid’s Walking Into White is in stores now. Our review from August is here.
