“My first experience with vinyl was as a child being obsessed with copies of “The White Album” by The Beatles and ABC by The Jackson 5.”
“Music always played an important role in my family’s household growing up. I can remember wanting to listen to these records over and over but eventually our record player died and that made way for a new tape deck and then CDs. It wasn’t until my twenties that my love for vinyl resurged into my life.
In the early 2000s my friends owned a record store on the Cahuenga Crawl in LA called The Beat Market and this was in the pre-Ameoba era which would end up opening right down the street and eventually put them out of business. I spent countless hours in that store playing records and just falling in love with the culture of vinyl and the way it sounded and made me feel. I always loved the idea of owning a huge record collection but my dreams wouldn’t turn into a reality until I was a little older and could afford to have a vinyl addiction.
There is something special about going to your favorite record store and digging through the bins to see what you can find. Mono Records and The Record Parlour in Los Angeles are a couple of those stores for me. I never leave empty-handed and always enjoy the conversation that happens while I’m there.
We have come to have quite the collection and it spans so many genres. From metal and punk to blues, Americana and folk to hip hop as well as indie to classic rock and everything in between, it all seems to make sense. We buy what sounds good to us and always keep an open mind to most genres of music. I think having a diverse music collection amongst our group is what fuels us to make music that isn’t your typical Americana and provides us with so many different influences that we are constantly expanding our sound and trying new things within the genre.
I love vinyl because I feel like it lets you connect to the music more, with all its imperfections and crackles and hisses you get lost in the story that is being told. Rather than putting something on shuffle and letting random songs play in any order, when you put a record on you get to hear the album how the artist intended from start to finish.
I think one of our favorite things in the world is owning our friends’ bands music on vinyl, there is nothing like the smell of a fresh new vinyl record being played for the first time. When we released our first album Come Home, we were adamant about pressing it on vinyl. It was something we all had always wanted to do and it was such an awesome experience to go through and make it come to life. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the money this time around to press the new LP Delivery and Departure on vinyl but we hope that sometime in the near future we can do a special limited release of it.
There is so much good music out there in the world and we love the fact that most bands are choosing to do their releases on vinyl these days. Don’t be afraid to hop out of your comfort zone and search for new music. You may just end up finding your favorite new band.”
—James Orbison
“No Soul” is taken from The Sound of Ghosts’ forthcoming LP Delivery and Departure, in stores Friday, January 19, 2018.
