“My (new) relationship with vinyl.”
“Before I was born everyone was already using CDs… I am a newcomer to vinyl. In fact the first vinyl record I ever owned was one I bought only 6 years ago, and the purchase was just out of irony. I was eyeing off jackets in a thrift shop in Sydney, Australia, when I stumbled across a record called Hey Joe! Hey Moe! by Moe Bandy and Joe Stampley.
The cover was two cheery men, hanging out their car doors sporting cowboy shirts, holding beers, with massive ear to ear grins with their thumbs up. And, as indicated by the speech bubbles above their heads, one was shouting “Hey Joe!” and the other replying “Hey Moe!” I was hooked. Not on these guys, but the fact that album covers could be so shit, yet still make it to press. I started spotting bad record album covers all the time and kept buying them to tile across my walls at home.
A favourite and many-times repeat offender on my wall was a bloke called Richard Clayderman, who would always be found leaning painfully awkwardly on pianos, keys, or sheet music. The fun never stopped and my wall slowly tiled to multiple rooms of the apartment. I was becoming unnerved though with the number of records I had collected, as I had not actually owned a record player even once at this stage. I needed to hear what these faces on my wall had to say. I needed to know what was going on through their heads whilst these terrible photos of them were being taken. I needed to hear their music. So, at a point roughly 4 years ago, I went to the local record store to buy a record player.
The record store changed me.
I fell in love with music all over again. Not that I had fallen out of love, I had just forgotten how exciting music was when you didn’t own absolutely EVERYTHING.
I remembered the feeling of wanting an album.
I remembered the pain of not having an album.
I remembered the feeling of ripping the shrink wrapping off a new album so I could race home to listen to it endlessly and then hopefully know the words better than all of my friends would the next day.
I still loved music but this was a different type of love. And to put it simply, NOTHING is special when you have everything.
I saw endless opportunities and knew my life was going to soon change for the better.
I knew straight away that I needed to get my hands on music I had never heard before. I needed to discover music which I couldn’t just stumble upon on my streaming app, music in another language, music only record stores have access to, and of course enter the musical tastes of each different record store owner.
But first I got my hands on my fav albums released in the previous few years. I did this so I wouldn’t just slowly forget them through time as my conveyor belt playlist continuously updates and drops to die anything removed.
I figured I could now could keep track chronologically of all the new music I was loving. And I have.
The combination of great albums I loved and new albums I discovered soon turned into my own private collection of printed music that was special to me.
A few months ago though something new hit me. What took me a great while to realise—I could finally give and receive the physical GIFT of music again.
A physical gift. A gift that someone can cherish and listen to, and not slowly forget as their playlist updates. I guess it took a while as my friends had to slowly attain their own vinyl record players. But, it was all now possible.
For me, music printed onto physical ‘gifts’ that I received whilst growing up, is what made me who I am.
The gift that made me first sing and dance around the house as a 3-year-old was my very first CD from my mom, “Black Lace – Agadoo.”
The gift that had me at 8 years old obsessed with hip hop, and running around school rhyming words with my friends was a CD from my uncle, The Message – The History Of Rap.
The gift that got me learning guitar at 11 years old and wanting to write songs was a CD in a santa stocking, Blink 182’s The Mark, Tom and Travis Show.
Often gifts are meaningless and forgotten quickly, but the 3 absolute most important gifts I ever received as a kid growing up were CDs. They were a form of printed music, and I never forgot them.
CDs have been gone for a good while now, and for the past 7 or so years I’d find myself often thinking things like, “Shit, I could, probably message my little brother a link to this new album, but would he even listen? And, if he does listen how long would it be ’til he simply forgets about it?” I thought, for my own experiences to be passed on, was simply just impossible.
Vinyl opened up every door that I thought was closed.
I have already made plenty of my own incredible music discoveries and lifelong memories for myself with vinyl, but I cannot wait to gift these musical discoveries and lifelong memories to others.”
—Reuben Styles
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PHOTO: IAN LAIDLAW
