Featured Conversation: Collecting Across Generations - a Talk With My Daughter, Natalie

Published on Jan 26, 2025

I sat down with my daughter, Natalie Sparaccio, to talk about our records, and how we influenced each other’s music taste and collection.

Let’s start with an introduction.

I’m Natalie. I’m a 35 year old photographer and barista in LA, originally from Long Island.

So let’s talk about how you got into records and music. When, when your dad and I were married, we had a nice collection. We played records all the time. Even when CDs became popular, we still had the turntable and played albums, especially a lot of Springsteen. So you kind of grew up having records in the house. Do you have memories of certain things playing in the house when you were young?

Absolutely. The music that most reminds me of growing up and listening to your music in the house is Incubus’s S.C.I.E.N.C.E.

Yeah, I knew you were gonna say that.

S.C.I.E.N.C.E. is the core album of my childhood and I just remember it being on in the house all the time. Springsteen and Incubus and Sarah McLachlan.

Yes, Sarah McLachlan’ Fumbling Toward Ecstacy was a pivotal record. Things weren’t good when I was playing that one in the house. You stayed an Incubus fan?

I did, yeah. I remember calling the radio station to ask them to play them.

WHPC! It was the community college station that had a nu-metal show on weekends.

Well, the memory that just popped up is my brother and I calling the station to request songs when we were, like, three and six and I remember wanting to hear a song and the guys at the radio station thinking it was so cool that kids were calling in requesting Korn.

So you and your brother both grew up loving music and wanting your own music to listen to. You weren’t satisfied just having our music playing. You wanted your own stuff. When you were three you asked for Green Day and DJ was into Soundgarden at that age. A lot of the music that I listened to when you were young, you kind of went another way. I stayed with the nu-metal for a while, and you went emo.

I did. The nu-metal did not stick with me at that age. It’s something that came back around when I was older. I took the emo route, for sure. I remember getting Dookie on cassette. I remember asking for CDs for Christmas, like, Taking Back Sunday.

Then I followed your lead with emo, which is different from how things usually work.

We influenced each other’s music from when I was like a child.

We’re talking about the early days of Taking Back Sunday. So you were influencing me even when you were in middle school.

Yeah, playing Tell All Your Friends on CD on my purple, transparent CD player.

And I was always like, what are you listening to? We did a reverse situation there.

But you did get me into Brand New.

Once I discovered emo, I discovered Brand New and then you hooked on to them right away. And that just never ended. That became your obsession.

Yea, it definitely wasn’t a phase.

Speaking of, tell me about your most prized record.

The red vinyl version of Brand New’s Devil and God. I got that when Jesse got canceled, and people were immediately selling all of their Brand New merch. And they were rage selling their things for good prices, and I had some money saved in the plans of following them on their last tour. I’m like, I might as well buy people’s merch with it. So that is my most rare album that I have, and probably the coolest one that I have. It was limited to 666 copies.

Tell me about some of your favorite records you own.

So I stopped my record collecting, because even when I was still in New York, I moved back and forth between different family members a decent amount, and once I got settled back at home with you, I knew I was going to be moving to California, so I sold a lot of my records for money to come here with, and still have not restarted my collection because I live in a very tiny, tiny place. But there are records that I left behind and I did not sell. They are my friends’ bands, and ones that are signed, and they feel more special to me. I kept the more precious ones that I’ll be excited to have and start fresh with when I start my collection back up again when I get my own place.

I kept everything that was special to me. All the Foxing and Brand New that I had. And my first record I ever bought, As Tall As Lions, I kept that. I don’t know if that’s what started it, but anyway it’s the oldest record that I have, and that was a band that I never thought that I’d see live. And then shortly after I got that album, they did a reunion tour. I think at the time there wasn’t a lot of pressings of it, so when they released it, it felt really exciting. And there was a lot of those like Deja Entendu, I never thought that I would get, that they would never do repressings, and for a time could only get Deja for like, $500. I have a bunch of signed Kevin Devine records from all the times that we would go see him at Looney Tunes. And I have records from friends. Secret Gardens, his album Tundra. And Con Etiquette is my friend’s band, I have that record.

It’s really awesome to have your friends’ records.

Yeah, that feels extra special to me, having those, even if I didn’t have a record player, that’s something that I would still have, just as a collection of my friends music in physical form. Looking at all these records feels like a time capsule, you know? Thinking about friends we don’t talk about anymore. I just remembered that when I first started collecting someone sent you the Rookie Lot record to give to me. That was Jesse Lacey’s first band. Just cool that someone sent that to me to get my collection going.

How did my record collecting influence yours, even though yours has gone well beyond mine.

Well,when, when you had started collecting, I was still on CDs. I had sold a lot of my albums. I still had a lot of stuff from high school and some stuff from Record World (where I worked) but I sold a lot of records. So when you started to collect, it kind of piqued my interest a little bit, you know? I was like, well, what if I started buying records again? But at that time, they weren’t really that popular. This was right before vinyl got popular again and they were expensive.

What really got me started is bands slowly starting to do repressings.

I think I got started on my collection again with a Queens of the Stone Age album. At the time, Todd (my ex) had a turntable, so I listened to it. I was like, this is the way to listen to music, right?

That’s something I miss about not having a record player with me here, is it feels so much more intimate. It’s screen free listening. You don’t have to be on your phone, you don’t have to be on your computer. You don’t have to be on a screen to play your music. It feels like the way you’re supposed to listen to music, and it’s just you and the album in the order that it’s supposed to be in, not that I would never not listen to it in the right order. People who shuffle albums are psychotic. Yeah, that’s besides the point. But you know, the artist made it physically that way, and it feels like listening to records. It feels like paying respect to the artist. But really, the main thing I miss about it the most is that intimacy of it and the screen free listening and getting to just really be with the music outside of all the digital stuff.

True, because when I have an album on, I am in tune with it in a different way than I am on my computer. I find if I’m listening on my laptop to a playlist or whatever, even an album, it’s kind of going over my head sometimes, like background music. Yet when I put on a physical album, I do it intently. I do it with a purpose.

And you have to get up and flip it over.

Yep, many times these days, because they keep splitting albums into four sides.

And when the record ends, the record ends. There’s no automatic shuffle that happens next, and it’s not just going to play it over and over again.

You have to engage with it. I have to intently get up and turn it off and maybe put something else on. It’s a whole act of playing the record that it’s more in depth than listening to it on streaming, for sure. And I hear it differently. Not physically, but I hear it emotionally differently, right? More in tune with it.

I look forward to restarting my record collection. I’m curious what it’ll look like now, because looking at this picture of what I have at home and where my record collecting stopped, it feels like another lifetime ago, and it feels like, I guess it feels like a time capsule. So I’ll keep the ones that are precious to me and have some extra meaning to it, like the records with my friends and things that are signed. And I’m excited to start fresh.

Okay, if you were going to start fresh today would be the first record you would buy.

I think I’d start collecting by band. Right now I have all of Brand New, I don’t have all of Foxing, so I think I’d start there. I think I’d complete the Foxing discography. And then I’d do the Death Cab For Cutie discography.

Oh, one special record I forgot to mention is Best Ex, Good at Feeling Bad. I did the cover photography. It was my first and only time, so far, having my photography on a record. And it’s really cool. Shout out to Mariel for having me do that, and to Sarah Simone for taking pictures with me for that, for the album release and for the music video.

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Two days after we had this conversation, Natalie went to On Maritime Records in LA and found the above pictured Springsteen album. My influence is still there in both taste and action.

Natalie Sparaccio is a Long Islander living in L.A., where she is a barista and photographer. You can find her work at natsparaccio.com. You can also find her on instagram and bluesky

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