Featured Conversation: Talking With James Cassar

Published on Mar 7, 2025

Would you like to introduce yourself?

I’m a former music writer and artist manager, record label owner, things like that. Very early on in my writing career, I was managing editor of this website called Modern Vinyl. It no longer exists, but I had a podcast, and a staff of writers, and your website, Michele, really does remind me of what we were doing, kind of the same features at MV so I was really excited when you started this website, because it reminded me of what I used to do. I have maybe 20 records left. I did an inventory before I left my apartment, but I sold most of my records to buy a virtual pinball machine.

Let’s talk a little bit about that, about your decision to give up your records.

So I started collecting when I was 19, but by the time I was in my mid 20s and I had moved to Philadelphia, I had noticed that while I brought my turntable and my records and my speakers and everything to listen to records I wasn’t really doing so, but I kept buying records. So when I sold my record collection, there was a lot of sealed and near mint stuff that I had only listened to maybe once. But I loved Philadelphia’s record stores, so I was always going, and I lived near my favorite, which is Long in the Tooth Records and I would just go there and have some retail therapy. It was the easiest way to get over being mad about something for a while. So I would go there, but I just wouldn’t listen. I think it just becomes less about the ritual of, you know, putting a record on and flipping it over and really listening intently. I think I just got so busy with what I was doing putting out other people’s music, not always on vinyl, usually on tape, that I just stopped doing what I had taught myself to do before I got into my 20s, with Modern Vinyl and everything.

But mostly I loved the ritual of going and finding something, the hunt of finding a record that you’ve been looking for for a while. That’s really fun. I mean, my partner, Nicole, still collects. And we were in Philly last weekend, and it was just fun to watch her collect stuff. And so I think I still like the ritual of going to a store, flipping through the stacks, finding some things I don’t necessarily want to play myself, but I still have a deep appreciation for creating vinyl, creating vinyl packaging, and then what goes into that. And you know, it was a long, almost like 13-15, years of collecting and appreciating the format. But now I’m just kind of an observer to it, and it’s an interesting kind of vantage point to be at as a former collector. 

But my decision to sell the collection, ultimately, is because I got really into pinball during the beginning of the pandemic. I’ve been playing my whole life, but I started playing pinball video games a lot, and I really reactivated it. I just read your essay on pinball and David Bowie, and I really just resonated with it. So I found this guy that made me a machine, and I just bought it on credit, and then decided, finally, let’s give up the Dream Collection. You know, my collection wasn’t very big, but I had some stuff that I was proud of finding. Some of the things I kept were the things I was proudest of finding, like a four LP box set of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness by the Smashing Pumpkins, of course, so that’s one thing I’m really proud of having in my collection still.

Another thing I still have, kind of anecdotally, I was an intern at Rhino Records in their custom products division, and literally, all they did was repackage things that existed in the Warner Music Library for things like records today. And so they asked me, What would you like to see pressed? And I said, R.E.M.’s Unplugged sessions, the MTV one. And, you know, a couple of short days later it was pressed. And I grabbed that. And it was really neat to kind of have a very, very small, in that actually happening. You know, I like to say that I had something to do with that coming to life. 

The thing that I may have regretted is, you know, record flipping is a sensitive topic, and I feel like I have a lot of things that held their value, but I also ended up not listening to my records. And ultimately, records are for collecting, but they are for listening. And I have a lot of records that were brand new, that were like newish releases that I feel like people who would want to listen to them could buy them new from the labels or stores. So I didn’t want to rip people off. So I just said, Here’s my Discogs. One day I tweeted it, my Discogs link, and I said, if it’s 12 inch, 20 bucks, if it’s anything smaller than that 10. And there were a lot of rare seven inches that I had, rare splits, compilations and things like that and I just let people have at it. I sold all that stuff within a month, and the stuff that I still have is either on my wall at home - I have this kind of collage I made when I moved in that took some of the records that I had and I put them in the middle where the label is, and I created a little maximalist wall of some of the remainder of my collection. You know, I prioritized colored vinyl for that. So it looked really neat, a little time capsule that is part of my life. I like that it still survives, either in a crate or in a box or on my wall. So I didn’t get rid of everything, because it was a huge part of my musical journey, I think, to collect analog media, also like putting out cassettes. That’s the other format that I feel like had a niche resurgence when I was in college. And what you have other than time in college is a knack for coming up with new hobbies. That was one that really still has stuck with me, even if the listening aspect of it is kind of waned. So I’m proud to say that it’s still in pieces in my life.

How did you decide what to keep? You said you kept about 20 records?

Sentimental value, or kind of like things that made, kind of made the journey of vinyl collecting so fun and so rewarding. I mean, the Mellon Collie box set, some things that I’ve put in frames. I have a copy of the Simpsons Sing the Blues. Of course, that’s not a rare record, but it’s just I love the Simpsons, and so I kept it just to have it. 

I have a first pressing of the Modern Baseball Sports record that I just love and then I have the one on my wall. I have this 12 inch. It’s a compilation called Strength in Weakness, and it has Modern Baseball, and it has Marietta. There’s Hurry, there’s a lot of Lame-o early Philadelphia things from them, but it was a comp for United Cerebral Palsy, and it was dedicated to me. So that was another thing that I had kept, because that was another kind of sentimental thing. But if I didn’t sell certain records, they ended up on my wall. I tried to minimize opening things that I would want to either show to somebody someday or re-listen to once I’m near a turntable and have the records in the same place as somebody else. So I think it was all a matter of, I don’t want to list this on Discogs and give it away for more or less money than the sentimental value. I think some things were priceless to me that way. 

What are your favorite record stores?

Stores in general, we’ve got Long in the Tooth in Philadelphia. It wasn’t the first record store I went to in Philadelphia, but it’s the one that I’ve been to the most. Not only does it have a great selection of records and tapes and CDs and things like that, but it also has a great selection of new music books. And by the end of my record collection journey, I would always kind of gravitate towards the music books first, because it felt like a collection more prevalently in my home than vinyl. What are some other ones around the country? Amoeba, of course, going to Amoeba always feels like a great treat. I’ve only been to the Hollywood location, but when I was out there interning at Warner Music, it was such a sweet treat to go there.

 I have to shout out Melody Supreme in Charlottesville, Virginia. When I went to school at UVA, I would always frequent it. It’s a vinyl only store. There are two record stores in Charlottesville. I worked at the other one, which also sold CDs, tapes, DVDs, whatever, but I always gravitated towards Melody Supreme as a consumer, because of their sweet curation. And they really take pride in putting everything in poly bags. Of course, if it’s used, they have these really personalized cards that they put in each poly bag to tell you if it’s a special release. I remember I bought a double 10 inch of the Police record, Regatta de Blanc. It was cool because I’ve only usually seen that as an LP. So it was neat to find a double 10 inch because it’s cool to see a mass market release in that way. So that’s a good store as well. Let me see, I’ve been to a lot of different stores. If you go to the Seattle airport, the Sub Pop store is kind of a record store in itself. I really enjoy Sub Pop as a label, when it comes to their packaging, the way that they put releases together, and it was cool to see it in kind of a physical way. I’m in Baltimore now, so we just went to Celebrated Summer Records, and that’s a really neat spot if you’re in the Baltimore area. They’re really neat. And inside that store, they have a vending machine where you can get cassettes, which is cool.

 How did you get interested in music as a kid?

I didn’t grow up with vinyl. I grew up mostly with CDs. My parents, they built their CD collection via Columbia House, the mail order catalog. And my sister, right before I got an iPod, she would have a really messy room, so she would ask my brother and I to help, and she would usually give things she no longer wanted to us. And a lot of them for me were CDs. So I remember getting Weezer’s green album and Blink 182 Enema of the State, with the caveat that I could only listen to certain tracks. Sowhen I got my iPod, I put the whole CD on my iPod, and then I kind of went down the Blink path. And that was in sixth grade. But my sister, she kind of lit that spark, because prior to that, I was really only into the Backstreet Boys and things like that. My early fascinations with music were kind of more in that realm, and then the iPod sent me down a different path. Once iTunes kind of changed the paradigm for how to rip music from the library, or raid your own CD collection, or Limewire or something like that. It totally just kind of sent me down a different path.

Being able to get anything you want to listen to…

I think with iTunes, though, like I’ve been thinking about this with streaming, because it’s like iTunes, but you’re not limited to 30 second previews, and you’re not gated behind a 99 cent price tag. You have access to everything, which is kind of a teenage dream for me. But at the same time, I think having that restriction being like, I can only listen to this part, and this was pre YouTube. Having a wish list and iTunes and limiting yourself to those 30 seconds of being like, I wonder what the rest of the song sounds like, that’s a whole different experience, because it sounds so much more rewarding when you buy it with your allowance or whatever. And it was actually a good song, so I liked that a lot.

How did you get into collecting?

The first record I collected, I collected because I had started writing for the UVA newspaper, the Cavalier Daily, and one of my first assignments was there was a used and new record fair in Charlottesville, at the Holiday Inn in town. So I took a couple of buses to the record fair, and I just walked around and interviewed people for the day. But I saw a copy of the Earth is not a Cold Dead Place by Explosions in the Sky. I loved that record, and so I bought it without having a turntable. And then I got a turntable for Christmas, like a really shitty Crosley, the suitcase thing, and went to the record exchange in Frederick, Maryland, and bought a copy of R.E.M.’s Green and the Fast Times soundtrack. And I loved that soundtrack, and I love that movie. So it was just a really cool used pickup. And so after that, I just started going to every record store I could. There was a similar record fair the next fall that a radio station, WTJU  (UVA college station) was cleaning out the archives, and they had everything. Everything was $1 so I picked up a lot of my collection that way. A lot of bands that did not survive, or don’t even have entries on Discogs, like a lot of stuff like that; a seven inch of Pinback’s “Loro.” And this was funny. This was before Blink 182 vinyl was a thing. I found a seven inch of the song “Lemmings,” and I had it in my hand. I was like, cool. This is rare. I love Blink. I’m gonna take this. And some kid took it out of my hand! That same week, I started writing for Modern Vinyl at the urging of one of my exes. And I met those guys and started writing about records in my collection and reviewing it like it was paid labor, you know. 

And then in 2014 on 4/20 we launched the Modern Vinyl podcast, and we went to South by Southwest as a podcast, and we recorded a record on seven inch vinyl at Urban Outfitters. This guy, Tyler Bisson, who runs a lathe cut vinyl like mail order service called Audio Geography. He was there, and we recorded an episode on the record. And it’s just like I have a lot of fond memories of just like going around the country with this site, you know, talking about records to either a non captive South by Southwest podcast stage, or in a record store called Pinwheel Records in Chicago, we, I guess we closed for Braid. There was an impromptu Braid performance, and they played “A Dozen Roses” and then we talked about music and movies for an hour. A lot of my memories are kind of linked to writing for that site and kind of creating a lot of content that was vinyl focused. You know, when we reviewed an album, it wasn’t so much about the album, it was the packaging, it was the artwork, it was the sound quality of the records. How many times have you bought a record from a boutique label or Hot Topic and it sounds like shit, there’s pops, and in the case of some releases like the vibe, the labels are on the wrong sides. Yeah, I love vinyl. It’s still cool. It’s cool to see it. I just think, like, my listening habits changed as far as, like, when I want to listen to an album, do I want to listen to it now, or do I want to do the ritual, I guess I got lazy.

J Cassar (they/them) is a writer and Minions enthusiast from Baltimore, MD. Prior to exploding in 2022, was an artist manager, music publicist, and annoying pontificator. These days, they’re still pontificating, just on a smaller scale, via the “snoozeletter” Life’s so boring, which you can read, subscribe to, and internalize via lifessoboring.com. 

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