Great American Canyon Band, The TVD First Date

“Kris and I feel like a person is either into vinyl or they aren’t. It’s a form of musical intake that is tactile. It requires patience and exploration. It’s a journey that will take you places you may have never intentionally meant to go. We might begin thumbing through our collection under the pre-tense that we want to hear Prince, or John Prine, or Mozart, but because we purposely do not organize our vinyl collection in any way, we end up pulling out 1 to 5 other records that catch our eye and will shape the next few hours of our day simply through chance.”

“When Kris and I were first courting each other, one of the first things we looked at relative to the other was their vinyl collection. We’d sit in each other’s apartments and laugh at the others odd individual pieces or revel in the ones we shared. We weren’t even singing or writing music together at this point, but we were intertwining our musical helixes.

We’d spend afternoons rummaging through goodwill vinyl bins, walking the aisles at warehouse flea markets, or just sifting through the used vinyl section down at Sound Garden in Baltimore. We’d try to make sense of why someone had lost touch with this record or that record and more often than not leave with a dozen or more new additions to our now synergetic and growing collection.

This way of attaining vinyl has meant our collection serves as a learning device for us as well. We feel like all music is just part of the ether once it’s published, but there is something about putting together a stack of records that you want to hear that day that is just about the most satisfying thing a person can do.

We actually recently watched the documentary on Muscles Shoals and when it was done, like kids on Christmas morning we ran out to our shelves filled with our LPs and began pulling out Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” Bob Seger’s “Night Moves,” Bob Dylan’s “Slow Train Coming,” and even Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “First And Last.” As we dropped the needle on each new record we’d laugh in affirmation of how signature that studio and those musicians sound truly was.

As of today our vinyl collection has travelled from Baltimore, to Athens, to Los Angeles, to Chicago, and finally back to Baltimore. It’s one of the few elements of our home, which has actually made every journey and we’ve never thinned the herd. We can only claim our plants and dog Johnny Cash as having also made every journey.

Our LPs are abiding friends joining us as we walk along this road. And as we prepare to put Only You Remain out into this kaleidoscope of sound, it’s our vinyl that perpetually reminds us of what a wide amazing web we are making ourselves a part of. It truly is wild.”
—Paul Masson