“I was a child of the CD era so it wasn’t until college that I started appreciating vinyl records.”
“Growing up, I would walk around with a SONY DiscMan and an over-the-shoulder CD case full of late ’90s and early 2000s pop album—P!nk, Destiny’s Child, N’SYNC, Now That’s What I Call Music compilations. Aside from the occasional spooky night at my neighbor’s house, spinning her older sister’s Led Zeppelin albums backwards to listen for subliminal messages, records were not much a part of my childhood.
When I was in college though, I had a few friends who were into vinyl and one of my best friends had a record player at her apartment off-campus. I remember going over there and putting on some Dawes records—one of our mutual favorite bands—and just having a totally different listening experience than I’d ever had before. We weren’t checking our phones, weren’t checking Facebook.
We pretty much had a few hangs with the sole intention of tuning out from everything that was going on at school and in our lives, and the slowed-down pace of vinyl listening was really conducive to that. No track skipping, no fast-forwarding. It was the very opposite of another common college experience of the ‘pregame’ before going out to party—wherein a bunch of drunk kids would bounce back and forth to the laptop or iPhone switching to a different dance song every half a minute.
It was by this very cool friend with the very cool record player that I learned how to operate one. And the next Christmas my brother and sister chipped in to buy me my own, along with all three Dawes records that were out at the time.
That’s when I commandeered my parents’ old vinyl collection and started spending summer evenings listening to Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen, Simon & Garfunkel—albums I’d heard many times on CD but that I couldn’t wait to hear with that vinyl warmth and that magical quality that makes you want to slow down and hear the entire record start to end.”
—Megan Talay
Talay’s self titled EP arrives in stores on June 2, 2017.
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