Author Archives: Special to TVD

“My first record was Let It Be by The Beatles. It was given to me by a random woman (I can’t remember where) when I was in the 8th grade. At the time, I had just started getting into the Beatles and music in general, so I didn’t have a record player. I had to beg my sister to let me use hers, and even then she only let me listen to it once.”

“By the time I got my own record player, I discovered The Doors and their debut album ended up being the first record I purchased myself. I later got it signed by John Densmore. Since then, a majority of my money goes to purchasing records. I go to record shops regularly, even making sure to stop in a few in different cities while on tour. I still listen to digital music all the time, but there’s just just something special about vinyl.

Digital music is easy to carry around with you on your phone, but listening to vinyl is an experience—everything from hunting down the records, purchasing them, listening to them, admiring the artwork… it’s like a ritual. I get a buzz from digging through old boxes of LPs, taking them home and listening to them for the first time.

Records are what opened my eyes (and ears) to music not just as a background noise, but as a mythical art form filled with emotion and passion. Every day since my first vinyl experience, I’ve had music on my brain 24/7.

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“I first got into vinyl at the age of 14.”

“Melbourne’s largest vinyl store Vinyl Solution lay just around the corner from my family home, so every weekend I’d take my bike and purchase a second-hand vinyl or two. I had a really lovely next door neighbor who introduced me to bands like Mahavishnu Orchestra, Can, and David Axlerod around that time, so I’d always be crate digging with them in mind.

Around the age of 19 I got heavily in to sampling old records because of my obsession with artists like Madlib, J Dilla, and The Avalanches. I always enjoyed asking Glen at Vinyl Solution about these old records that I’d never heard of and testing them out to see if there was anything I could sample. Artists like The Mamas & the Papas, Dave Brubek, and Joe Pass.

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“I remember getting my first record player for Christmas in my early 20s and being so excited to start my vinyl collection.”

“There’s something about listening to a favorite record on vinyl that is so nostalgic and special. In a culture where people stream music and hardly ever listen to a record straight through, I think vinyl is so exciting and important because it forces you to listen front to back to the record.

“We know first hand how much time and thoughtfulness goes into making a record. You think about song order and meticulously plan out how the record is going to flow, only to have hardly anyone actually listen to it front to back. It’s just the music culture we are living in right now, and it’s fine, but vinyl isn’t apart of that and that’s what makes it so special.

My favorite is to listen to singer/songwriter folk-type music on vinyl because I think a lot of that music was made to be listened to on vinyl, but our collection is really broad and diverse. We have almost all of the Ryan Adams records and play those probably the most. We’ve got several Band of Horses albums, The National, Tegan and Sara, Lana Del Rey, Amy Winehouse.

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“My first memories of vinyl were when I was a kid living in Oahu, HI, and my older cousin busted out an AC/DC Back In Black record. He would drop the needle at random spots and I’d guess which song was playing off the album. We’d also have air guitar contests and I’d always win; this was a good 8 years before I started actually playing guitar so I guess it was in my blood!”

“From there it was Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Captain Fantastic, Kiss’ Destroyer and Alive!, Black Sabbath’s Heaven And Hell and Paranoid. I loved the artwork on these albums, and would stare at it while playing the records. There were a slew of 45s I wore out: The Village People’s “YMCA,” Kool & The Gang’s “Celebration,” Kiss’ “I was Made For Loving You,” and then there was my grandfather’s amazing collection of Cuban music that I loved. Even now, whenever I hear traditional Cuban music, I’m transported back in time to when we’d build puzzles and listen to his records.

The thing I love most about vinyl is the packaging and the artwork. It helps convey the tone and feel of what the artist is going for musically, or it can be a visual experience of what an album is about. Its part of a band’s branding. When I first bought an album I would read the lyrics off the liner notes while singing along to the music, and there were also credits (remember those?) so I’d know exactly who played on the records and who mixed and produced the tracks.

The old jazz albums would have forwards on them, like a book, providing great context for the listener. I think that credits are the most important thing missing from today’s digital downloads and streams. I’m a musician, but I’m also a producer, and the lack of focus on these details on iTunes, Spotify, and other DSPs is disappointing. With vinyl’s resurgence, artists can now include the credits, backstories, and lyrics once again. This is great!

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“The first record I ever owned was Bob Marley’s Kaya. The Marley records always sounded best on vinyl. You notice more richness and depth in the music because there is a perfect amount of rhythmic space. The intricacies have more value—a wider sonic plane. Kaya is still my favorite record… “Easy Skankin’” is my anthem.”

“Every once in a while, my mom would come home early from work and find my brother Josh and I in a smoke hazed room listening to all her old records. She’d be super pissed, ground us, and take away our car privileges so we couldn’t go anywhere. That led us to staying at home, listening to more records, and jamming guitar with each other. He’s actually on tour now as well. Thanks ma!

Whenever we had a chance, Josh and I would scavenge all of our family members old record collections. Zeppelin, Hendrix, Simon & Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan—LOTS of Dylan. I remember the sound of the needle on the record and how different it was from cassettes and CDs. Vinyl sounded so warm and fat that it made CDs sound one-dimensional. It made me realize how special those old analog recordings were because of the deeper, more saturated tones.

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“I first became aware of rock ‘n’ roll music because of the Beatles. I was a small child under three years old when a friend of my mother left the 7-inch of “She Loves You” in the small northwest London flat where I spent the first decade of my life.”

“I was obsessed, playing it over and over on the small Dansette record player in our front room. I kept discovering new bits of the song—because it took me days to work out how to put the needle on the very edge of the vinyl enabling it to be heard from the beginning.

My parents were separated and my brother Dave and I would spend every other weekend with my dad in his tiny apartment in the Lots Road area of Chelsea. If I stood in the hallway I often heard the music of The Beatles filtering down the stairs from the top floor flat. The guy who lived there invited me up one day and we listened together—he was as transfixed as I was. He was probably in his early twenties and I was six—but the music transcended that age barrier. We drank Tizer together (a peculiarly British 1960s soda) and listened to Beatles For Sale.

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“Right now we live in a world that craves authenticity. We’re always looking for truth, for reality, for a sense of realness. To me, vinyl is the real, bare-bones version of music. It pulls both ideas and imperfections to the surface. It’s something that you can observe with your own eyes, watching the needle palatably trace through the little grooves that, after touring almost 240 days a year, can start to look like thin roads in a map leading to the end of a side. When it’s finished, you simply flip it and start again.”

“The “analog” process of meticulously letting the needle float to the fragile surface of the record is something we don’t often get to experience in a microwave society. So, when I’m on the road, I order a record and have it delivered to my dad’s work, and he’ll leave it on the steps that go up to my room. Seeing those little flat boxes lining my staircase is one of my favorite things. I usually find myself listening to each record in turn while unpacking my bags. It’s like comfort food. It establishes a sense of finality and conclusion, and really makes me feel like I’m coming home.

My first experience with vinyl came from my dad, who taught me how to use it when I was eighteen—an age I felt self-conscious about, since I was just learning about vinyl. I’d been in plenty of record stores, but I mostly traced my fingers over the covers with the same overwhelming feeling of indecision that I got when I went to the public library as a kid. There was so much to know and such spontaneity to that learning; the sheer vastness of the vinyl world felt unconquerable.

My dad was really cool about it, though. He plugged the record player in and put on a record, pulled the needle back until it clicked subtly and the record spun. “This is the best sound in the world,” he said to me, as he lowered the needle. There was a little bit of nostalgic, static-y fuzz. For a second, I really felt his contentedness; I could almost see him rocking out to Led Zeppelin records in his youth, bending the strings of his old red Fender Stratocaster alongside those tones. Then Rick Astley blasted out of the record player, and my dad (whose name is Rick) literally Rick-rolled me.

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“My older sister Lea was the one who first discovered our parents’ vinyl collection.”

“It was the mid-to-late ’80s, I wasn’t yet 10, and most likely still listening to MC Hammer tapes. I knew the Beatles, the Stones, and Motown from hearing my mom play those tapes in the car. But when big sis unearthed those boxes and gave the record collection a prominent place in our living room, it brought those artists and their music to life.

Twenty five years later, I still value the experience of putting on a record and having the music be the focus of the moment. That was one of the reasons Mutts starting pressing vinyl. I wanted to make our records an experience—so I put a lot into designing the packaging, and with each pressing we tried a new technique for the wax itself.

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“It took a little while for me to get into music really, other than singing along to my Dad’s records in the house. He’d play Led Zeppelin and The Who pretty regularly.”

“I was always out playing football with friends when I was younger, but that started to change when my Dad one day came home with four records for me. He gave me Oasis’ Definitely Maybe and What’s The Story Morning Glory as well as Blur’s Parklife and The Great Escape. I immediately became obsessed with all four of them and I’d play them on rotation over and over. As a result I never preferred Oasis over Blur or vice versa. I used to annoy the hell out of my parents as the record player was in the corner of our kitchen and I’d just sit on the counter listening to them while they were trying to cook.

That was my real introduction into discovering music and I ended up digging through more of my parents’ record collection. It wasn’t that long before I started listening to Sgt. Pepper’s by The Beatles, but then a few years later I was swiftly told off when I tried scratching with it, having just watched a Limp Bizkit video. Obviously. Other notable scratching experiments include 10cc and a Bob Marley live record. Cool.

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“My older brother and my dad both had extensive record collections when I was growing up. My dad loved Christmas albums, so we had this really weird and random collection of Christmas albums from a really disparate group of artists. He would blast The Beach Boys Christmas Album on Christmas Eve, and while I usually really disliked holiday music, that album was kind of okay. He also had a very large Elvis collection, so it was very common to come into our house and hear those records playing.”

“My brother’s collection was more interesting to me—lots of Rolling Stones, Beatles, Pink Floyd, Ogden Edsl. I think the first records I owned as a kid were probably Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Twisted Sister’s Stay Hungry. (I never remember the album name Stay Hungry, I just usually describe it as that gross album cover where he is eating that bone.)

I didn’t maintain a record collection when I moved to NYC. I admire people who can do it here as space is really limited, and collections get heavy to move around as you move apartments frequently as one often does here. I have some friends who spin records and have amazing collections. There are also a good number of DJs still playing records all around who draw a kind of cult following. I was in Berlin a few years ago at this cool local bar in Kreuzberg, and it was packed with locals to hear two DJs spinning records side by side, really rare ’60s and ’70s stuff. The energy was unparalleled and has stuck in my mind about the power of records to this day.

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