“I grew up with vinyl records in the house; they were on a rack about two inches off the floor under my parents’ stereo. My dad would always lament to me how he had sold his first record collection, that had all his old rock & roll records, like Buddy Holly, early Rolling Stones, stuff like that, when he was in college, and how he wishes he still had them. He actually will still tell me that story, probably anytime I mention record collections.”
“I’ve always loved vinyl, the format is just so visceral, physical, it’s big and you can hold it in your hands and really get a good look at the album artwork. There’s a beautiful, ritual element to playing a vinyl record, an intentionality about putting the needle to the record, that you don’t really get with anything else.
When I was in high school, I would hang out at this record store, hi-fi, in the town in Boston where I grew up, and talk to the guy who worked there to learn more about indie rock and get exposed to different kinds of music. I remember he introduced me to Os Mutantes when Beck’s Mutations came out, saying how Beck had gotten a lot of inspiration for that record from them.
I think the first record that I bought was the first album by The Cars. I had played drums in a band at summer camp and we had covered “Just What I Needed.” I must have been 13 or 14. I gave it to my girlfriend because she had a record player and I didn’t. Actually, the first time I had sex was with her, in her room, playing Blondie’s Parallel Lines, side B, on her record player.
When I was in college I got my first record player, it was a little blue box that had a speaker inside of it, and that was when I started building my collection. At first I would just get whatever records I could, whatever looked cool or weird and was cheap. As the collection grew I started to show a little discernment, refinement, in what I chose to bring home.
There was a summer when I lived in Oberlin, Ohio with my girlfriend at the time, and that was all we had to listen to music on. We would go to the flea market on the weekends and buy records, and that’s how I got a bunch of the records that I love the most and still have now, from that flea market in Ohio. It’s also where I got my first cast-iron pan.
I got interested in how iconic the vinyl record is, and started making collages on the jackets, as an experiment. I like how there is an element of sacredness to the vinyl record that no other medium of recorded music has, we cherish and care for our records in a way that speaks to how much we love and value them. So, I started making art on the jackets of some of my favorite records, just to make them even more special.” —SWF
SWF’s Let It Be Told arrives on store shelves on October 8 via Mecca Lecca Recording Co.
