Featured Essay: On Vinyl Regret

by Susanna Maize

I have always viewed my records as an extension of my person, a physical likeness of my taste shelved alphabetically by artist. A nerdy suburban teenager who spent entire afternoons scrolling tumblr, I carved out an identity for myself based on the music I listened to and turned to collecting vinyl as a way to hold this identity in my hands, seeing myself safely housed in the milk crate on my carpeted bedroom floor. 

My records have seen first kisses and high school graduation, comforting me as I left my hometown to discover the world of music and love and heartbreak. I have always tried to keep it in perfect order, a signifier that I was someone with taste, or someone at all. If anyone browsed my collection, I wanted every record there to tell my story; the perfect soundtrack to my life.

Old journals list my wishlists in purple gel pen, which original pressings were the most sought after, which bands were special enough to trade in my latest paycheck for. When starting out, every purchase felt like a monumental step towards the perfect collection, a life-or-death decision. I enjoyed listening to them, of course, but they also became my trophy shelf, a source of pride, an obsession that I spent hours and hours daydreaming about.

An equal amount of brain power also went into the delicate art of weeding my collection to offload the records that no longer sparked joy. Over many moves across my teens and twenties, this was often necessitated by size and space constraints, bookshelf width or moving van capacity limiting the size of my collection. In these moments, the keep/sell decision felt even more momentous: If I only had room for twenty records, they better summate my entire being. 

I was quick to purge anything that I didn’t like or listen to enough, records that reminded me of people I didn’t speak to any more or the old me, frightened of being (gasp) cringey. When I went off to college, I got rid of over half of my collection, records that once meant so much to me that I didn’t want anyone else to see. I traded in one music taste for another, promising myself that this time I would get it right.

A lot of the records I sold I never thought of again, but a small few have remained ghosts of my shelf, reminders of hasty decision making or missed opportunities as my teenage self prioritized what other people thought over my own desires. I began to realize the consequences of this style of collecting when I was hit with a case of vinyl regret.

Vinyl regret can take a number of different forms. It can be the realization that you haphazardly handed off something valuable, or passed up a limited edition pressing that is now selling for five times the price. Or, spending too much on something that you never listen to. It can be not realizing what you had until it’s gone, the vinyl that got away.

Sometimes, the vinyl regret hits instantly. Home for Christmas one year, I brought a stack of neglected records to my parents’ local record store to resell, hoping to earn some credit to snag a couple of new releases. The cheery sales associate plucked Paul Simon’s self-titled from my stack, exclaiming that she had been looking for this and was going to get it herself. She played it over the PA system, and as I browsed I got to hear this album with new ears. I suddenly remembered why I had bought that record in the first place and wondered why I hadn’t thought to listen to it in years. Was it someone else wanting what I had passed on that made me want it more?

Other times, vinyl regret creeps in years later. In high school, I bought Seu Jorge’s David Bowie covers from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zizzou soundtrack, early manifestations of my love for Wes Anderson’s twee and Brazilian guitars. After learning it was a bootleg, my legalistic tendency got the best of me, and I resold it because it felt wrong or even illegal. Last month, I was over at a friend’s apartment and they spun that very record, the perfect background music to a dinner party. I can’t believe I got rid of that, letting my naivety narrow my focus away from enjoying beautiful music.

In these moments of reflection and regret, it sometimes is easy to be frustrated with my past self, hindsight reminding me of the vinyl mistakes that I’ve made over the years. But, I think this is what actually forms taste, growing pains as I learned what I liked and what I didn’t, and what I valued in my collection. I’m much slower to get rid of records these days. I look at my record shelf now and see all of my past selves, former favorites I haven’t touched in years living next to the ones I play all the time.

For the records that I regret, I know that there will always be more; vinyl is not a finite resource. If I want to replace my Paul Simon or Seu Jorge, I can go back and support my record store, swallow my pride to buy something a second time, and give myself grace for imperfect collecting over the years. Or maybe I’ll find a new favorite that might gather dust once I’m done with it. Good thing I just got a bigger bookshelf.

Susanna Maize is a writer based in Brooklyn. She is a part-time farmer, ex-radio DJ, and forever bike commuter.