Stefan Alexander, The TVD First Date

“My love of record collecting actually started back when I was 16 when my brother gave me a hard drive of MP3s to put on my iPod.”

“On that drive I found Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, among many other legendary musicians. Somehow I learned about 78 RPM shellac records, the fragile, pre-1950s records that these artists originally released their music on. I began a quest to find more blues and jazz, going to the original source. I bought a multispeed record player off eBay and asked my grandparents and a few elderly neighbors if they had any 78s lying around. None of them were the rare ‘20s or ‘30s records I was looking for, but my small collection led to an article in our local paper.

Soon, dozens of people were calling me, offering me the boxes they’d been storing for decades in their attics or basements. Over the course of a couple of years, I accumulated over a thousand records. I did ultimately find a few by Billie Holiday, but I was also introduced to countless other musicians, many of them long forgotten. Folk, country, blues, vaudeville, big band, and all kinds of music from around the world.

The oldest records dated back to 1905. I’ve always been interested in history, especially the first half of the 20th century, but now I could actually hear it, in the same way the music was originally listened to. Some of the records I found held songs that may not exist anywhere else, so preservation was yet another motivation for my collection.

The music on all these records became one of my primary songwriting influences. There is an immediacy and a simplicity to those songs that I strive to replicate. The pops and crackles of those dusty records are like wrinkles on an old, wise face. Although I primarily write modern pop music, I still gravitate towards that pre-1950s era. It’s a place I go for nostalgia, for inspiration, to reground myself in my musical lineage.

My collection lives back at my parents house in Massachusetts, so whenever I go back, I always take a moment to pull a random record from the shelves and put it on the turntable. A sweet soprano, a warbling guitar, a milky orchestra, or a tumbling jazz quartet pours from the speaker and for a moment, I imagine my grandparents and my great-grandparents, standing around their record players, dancing around their living rooms, finding a moment of joy in that thin, fragile disk.”
—Stefan Alexander