My wife and I are record collectors. At the moment, we own 1,151 of them (I have an app on my phone cataloguing the collection), and that number has been growing at a good clip. There’s no real organizing principle—it’s a diverse collection of rock, classical, jazz, soul, and even a fair bit of vintage country. We like to think the collection embodies our very sophisticated tastes, but no one is this dedicated to music without a love that is somewhat irrational. Hipsters might ooh and ahh over the Gang of Four record or an early pressing of David Bowie’s Man Who Sold the World, but if you suggest there’s a hint of irony behind, say, all those John Denver records on the shelf . . . well, we don’t care what you think.
The collection originated with my wife, who never met a trend she was afraid to reject. When the rest of the world moved on to CDs, she kept buying records. When I met her, the fact that she was still carting around hundreds of cumbersome albums spoke to my own musical obsessions. It helped that back then records cost a pittance. The trade-off was the effort it took to find what you were looking for, whether it was driving across town to haunt garage sales in dodgy neighborhoods or digging through crates at flea markets. Naturally, the adventures were part of the fun—not to mention a great excuse to spend time with her.
If you live long enough, your quaint hobby is likely to become the cultural vanguard once more, and these days we’re feeling pretty vindicated. Record collecting has taken off in a big way again. Many new albums are again being released on vinyl. This has upsides and downsides. The upside is that more record stores have been popping up—a terrific little shop, Crooked Beat Records, just opened in our suburban neighborhood, and antique malls are suddenly filling up with small collections for sale. The downside is that the proliferation of record shops is the result of vintage records exploding in value. I have seen battered copies of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours for sale at upwards of $15, even though the record is so widely available I believe that ownership of it must have been mandatory in the late ’70s.
For a lot of people, the renewed popularity of vinyl is mystifying. But there are two compelling arguments for the superiority of vinyl. The first is the permanence of the object in an ephemeral culture. People who interact only with digital music tend to skip around and listen only to songs they like; they reject the form of the album, with its carefully curated collection of tracks, meant to be listened to sequentially. Large artwork, lyrics, and album credits enhance the experience. I like consulting the notes on the sleeve and knowing that my preference for certain Aretha Franklin recordings over others is easily explained by the fact that the legendary band from Muscle Shoals did the backing tracks. Spotify and iTunes reduce album covers to the size of a postage stamp and provide almost no information on how albums were recorded.
The second argument is technological. Recorded music is one of the few areas in which newer technology is demonstrably inferior. Sure, digital music is portable and convenient. But in the one area that should matter most—the actual sound—it falls short. In a nutshell, reducing sound waves to ones and zeros compresses certain frequencies. The frequencies eliminated are said to be outside the range of human hearing—but when you compare a CD to a well-calibrated record player, the sound is undeniably lifeless. Sure, in some superficial ways the record album may sound less pristine, but the revered British DJ John Peel put it this way: “Somebody was trying to tell me that CDs are better than vinyl because they don’t have any surface noise. I said, ‘Listen, mate, life has surface noise.’ ”
Lately, though, my wife and I have begun to wonder whether our passion for record collecting has become too consuming. The six-foot by six-foot shelving unit that houses our record collection is far and away the largest object in our tiny house. (This particular IKEA shelving is so cherished by record collectors, there was an online revolt when the Swedish furniture giant discontinued it a few years ago.) And then there are the hours and hours I have spent adjusting and repairing our fully automatic Pioneer turntable, which is older than I am.
But when all is said and done, record collecting gives more than it takes. Shortly before we were married, we embarked on what would become perennial reorganizations of our record collection. While shuffling through the albums, we both agreed that we liked the title of a particular Emmylou Harris record. A few years later, our first daughter was born. Every once in a while as I say her name, I find myself playing the song she’s named after in my head: “Evangeline.”
