Featured Essay: A Vinyl Love Story

by Ryan Herrera

Like all couples, my partner and I have a lot in common, most notably our first name. Yup, you read that right—we’re both named Ryan. But besides a shared Irish first name, there’s been another major tether throughout our relationship: our love of collecting vinyl.

Like all the best New York love stories, I met my partner Ryan in August of 2021 on the dance floor of a Manhattan gay club at 3:00 in the morning. I only had around 12 records in my collection at the time, most of them albums from my high school years circa 2012-2014 (think Lana Del Ray’s Born to Die and Bastille’s Bad Blood). Ryan didn’t have any records yet, but he’d been thinking about starting his own collection for some time. I showed him my collection and some recommendations on what turntable to get—I’ve always been partial to Audio-Technica players—not knowing the beast I was unlocking within him. 

From those early days of our relationship, collecting vinyl records helped bond us together. Some of our favorite dates involved grabbing iced chai lattes and walking around the West Village, hitting up a circuit of shops like Generation Records and Village Revival Records. We were basically regulars at Rough Trade Record Store in Rockefeller Center, an easy 10 minute walk from our Hells Kitchen apartments, and we’d often be found stumbling out of there with a bag of records whenever we wanted to get off the couch but stay close to home. For some of our more luxurious dates, I sought out some of the city’s best spots for audiophiles, such as Greenpoint’s listening bar Eavesdrop and the iconic Tokyo Record Bar (too bad neither of us are partial to omakase). 

Both of us had been avid concert and festival-goers for years, but collecting vinyl opened us to a whole new community and way to express our shared love of music. This brave new world extended far beyond New York City too. Whenever we traveled, we made sure to hit up some of the best record stores in new cities, some of our favorites being Charlotte’s Lunchbox Records, Hollywood’s Amoeba Music, and Edinburgh’s Assai Records. 

I quickly watched as Ryan’s collection exploded, expanding from a few LPs stacked on a coffee table to filling an entire vinyl storage cabinet in just over a year. His collection soon surpassed mine in size, though I made sure not to straggle too far behind. It soon became a bit of healthy competition, both of us seeing whose collection could edge out the other’s while simultaneously admiring what we had built together.

Though collecting records and experiencing live music has been a shared pastime of ours, our tastes in music are actually pretty varied. As gay men, we’ve both been sucked into the pantheon of mainstream gay pop: Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, Charli XCX, and Britney Spears have staked their claims in both of our collections. Beyond that, though, the overlap is pretty minimal. Ryan grew up in the middle of the millennial generation in Northern England, so his taste naturally leans towards pop punk or euro pop. When he’s feeling angsty or nostalgic, he’ll belt his heart out to Less Than Jake’s In With the Out Crowd or Fall Out Boy’s Believers Never Die. And if he wants to dance, he’ll reach for Sugababes’ Change or Girls Aloud’s Chemistry to get the blood pumping. I, a Colombian-American who grew up on the cusp of Gen Y and Gen Z, run the gamut of genres in my collection. On any given day, you can hear me listening to rap à la Kendrick Lamar’s GNX, indie rock via STRFKR’s Parallel Realms, electronic with ODESZA’s A Moment Apart, or latin pop throughRosalía’s Motomami. 

We learned a great deal about each other through our record collections—the albums that remind us of our childhoods, the ones we reach for when we need a good cry, the songs that lift our spirits when we want to get away from the world. It’s turned into a sort of love language too. Ryan’s been known to surprise me on occasion, bringing home Khruangbin’s Live at the Fillmore Miami record and Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack for Interstellar without my asking, simply because he knew I loved those artists. After our first year of dating, I gifted him a custom vinyl I called “Ryan & Ryan’s Greatest Hits,” where I put together a soundtrack of memory-laden tracks from our favorite moments together like Dua Lipa’s “Love Again” and Mating Ritual’s “U.N.I.” Little does he know that the follow-up record, Ryan & Ryan’s Greatest Hits Volume II, is well on its way for Christmas 2025.

In 2024, we made the decision to move in together after three years of dating. Naturally, the most important logistical question was what we were going to do with our vinyl collections, which totalled a combined 200 records at the time. Thankfully, we quickly found a custom furniture shop in our new neighborhood of Bushwick, and we worked with a stellar team to design our dream living room. We had a custom table made to hold our turntable, speakers, and a divot to display the records most recently purchased or played. The team also built custom wall cubes to hold our collection, which finally allowed us to organize all of our LPs in one space. From that point on, our collection merged into one, and we treated record shopping as a team sport. No more repeating vinyls, and whoever wanted to call dibs on buying an album could do so. It was a dream set-up for our collection, and we inaugurated the space with an album cover art-themed party for my birthday.

Earlier this year, we made another major move, this time across the pond to East Yorkshire in Northern England. Moving our collection was no easy feat, and we explored several options for the best way to transport our prized possessions. After seeing estimates of over $1,000 per box through traditional carriers like FedEx, we decided to go a more specialized route. Ryan got in touch with an English company that specializes in helping people abroad relocate to the area, so we packed up most of our collection in padded boxes and sent them on their way. After a few weeks of waiting with bated breath and a lost tracking scare, we were grateful to see the majority of our records arrived unscathed. Ryan did lose a couple signed vinyls along the way, but we expected a few casualties with a transition like this.

Today, our record collection is the centerpiece of our living room and our greatest joy. Ryan’s collection is at 149 records as I write this, and I’m not too far behind at 138 records. It’s almost become our second child, and when you look at the colorful array of sleeves on the shelves, you can see our individual and shared histories as we’ve evolved over the years. In a world as chaotic and uncertain as the one we live in today, everyone deserves to put on a record and dance their struggles away, and I’m so grateful to get to do that with my partner every day.

Ryan Herrera is a fiction writer from North Carolina. His writing has appeared on Cracked and on the adult website Cybersocket. He graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill with a BA in Journalism and will received an MA in Writing from Johns Hopkins University in 2025. He lived in New York City for 7 years as an advertising professional and now resides in East Yorkshire, England.