Featured Essay: Needle in My Memory: The Album I'll Never Stop Playing

by Mary Wanjiru

Other albums are like old friends; they are pleasant to listen to when they go through our lives, but they are quickly forgotten when a new film soundtrack comes into our lives. Some albums remain, and they penetrate our everyday routines and intimate experiences so that they are part of our memory. For me, that album is Rumours by Fleetwood Mac. It has been to me that anchor, friend, and in most respects, the soundtrack to my life. It is the one I listened to as a teenager, and the one that I keep reaching out to the shelf to this very day, some twenty-five years later. I have played it so often that it carries grooves etched with the music and my history.

I recall how I had first laid the needle on its surface. The turntable was secondhand, the speakers were hand-me-downs, but none of that made any difference when the first crackle yielded to the opening chords of “Second Hand News.” I was fourteen, and just beginning to see how big life was outside the cocoon of childhood, and this record came through as the voice that saw what I could not express yet. It was primitive, unclothed, and strange and comfortable. Even the initial hearing was not like a performance but a conversation.

The album was my silent companion in seasons of change as the years went by. When I was packing off to college, it was the only record I insisted on slipping between piles of textbooks and secondhand clothes. I would put the needle down on long nights of learning or homesickness and let “Dreams” fill the silence. This record accompanied me later through heartbreaks, when friends’ words only sounded like noise. Even though its lyrics seemed to understand the sorrow, its tunes lingered in my mind, and turning side A to side B reminded me that even endings could become beginnings.

What is above merely sounds with this album is the ritual that encompasses it. In the digital streaming era, when songs can be called up with a touch of the screen, listening to vinyl is mindful, almost religious. It is the careful removal of the record from its sleeve, the slight examination of the grooves, and the slight de-escalating of the tonearm. These small motions ask for presence. They require attention, and vice versa; the music is more serious, as if it is aware you deserve it.

My favourite part of the ritual is always to flip the record halfway. That silence, that interlude, is an interim of a sentence. It challenges me to listen by leaning in and remaining with the music instead of shifting it to background noise. A reminder in the process of listening is that participation is involved. It is not a dead gesture; there is a conversation: the record has something to give, and I take it.

As the years have passed, the record’s corrosion has become part of the story. The scratches may crack through the speakers as wrinkles on an old face, the marks of years that have been lived and love given. I could substitute the album with a sharp digital file devoid of flaws, but I do not want to do so. The little flaws bring me back to all the occasions when I returned to it. They are, at a rate, evidence of devotion.

Naturally, even the music itself is not deprived of its magic. Virtually every song has its own cluster of memories." Go Your Own Way" will always bring me to the first apartment, sitting cross-legged on the floor and surrounded by untaped boxes, not knowing what will happen next but knowing that it would happen big. “Don’t Stop” helps me to recollect nighttime car rides with friends, with the windows open and our shouts being heard over the record on a car stereo. And then we have Songbird, something I have had to turn to in cases where I needed to weep but could not find the key. Whenever I hear it, I go back to those moments, but I also get swept up in new moments because it reminds me that memory can exist with the present in sound.

People often ask why I am not tired of it. After all, music is supposed to be exploratory; there are always new artists, records, and voices. And I do listen widely. But Rumours isn’t about novelty. It’s about return. It’s about home. Listening to it is less like chasing excitement and more like reuniting with someone who has always known you. There’s a certain peace, a grounding that no new release can replicate.

The album continues to rotate on my turntable many years after my initial play. I sometimes play it to celebrate, console, and remember. It has become my accompanying song not to one of the chapters of life but of life. It has taken over my joys, sorrows, doubts, and hopes, and somehow, every time, it gives me back something transformed so that it becomes edible, nay, or even divine.

The name of the album, Needle in My Memory, is quite fitting because this album has left its mark on the memories of my life. The music remains long after I’ve moved homes, changed jobs, and said goodbyes. The ritual remains. And so does the comfort of knowing that whenever I lower the needle on Rumours by Fleetwood Mac, I am not simply listening, I am remembering.

Mary Wanjiru is a Kenyan author and storyteller passionate about memory, music, and little moments that make us who we are. She spends her time in her older vinyl record search, hand journaling, and long morning moods with a cup of strong tea when not writing. Her art investigates the connections in nostalgia, sound, and identity. This is her maiden contribution to I Have That On Vinyl.