Featured Essay: Treasures Inscribed on Vinyl

by Julia Reynolds

My mom handled her records with immense reverence, like fragile relics from a museum, precious treasures preserving audial inscriptions from the past. With patience and intention, she taught me to do the same throughout my childhood in the eighties and early nineties. 

When she shook an album carefully from its paper sheath into her hands, taking care to touch only the edges with her fingertips, it was almost as though she were shielding the music itself from any possible harm, as though one wrong move and a perfect chord or intricate guitar solo could fall to the floor and shatter like glass, shards of broken music notes scattering in all directions. She showed me how to clean the vinyl with an anti-static brush that reminded me as a child of a tiny chalkboard eraser, and how to place the needle in the groove with the delicacy and precision of a surgeon. 

Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon or Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks would suddenly fill our hundred-year-old house in Lynn, Massachusetts with the music of my mom’s teenage years in the late sixties and early seventies. I remember being almost afraid to touch the albums at first; I could see from the way she protected them that they were something special indeed, something that held a certain magic invisible to the eye.

My mom’s album collection was varied and vast, and weekend mornings could be set to a soundtrack of anything from Motown to Muddy Waters. Much later, as a middle schooler making my first mix tapes for friends on cassettes, I channeled the same energy my mom dedicated to choosing the right album to suit the occasion into my own playlists. Painstakingly, I chose songs for each tape like a discerning art curator, knowing an imperfect selection in the progression could topple the mood created by the music like a tower of cards. 

I remembered my mom flicking slowly through albums with the same slow, deliberate consideration, touching each one thoughtfully with a slightly furrowed brow. It wouldn’t do to place the needle in the wrong groove, Bob Dylan’s gravelly rasp resonating when truly, it was a John Lennon kind of day.

As I grew older, she told me the stories behind the songs and the artists. They were often sad stories, like the tragic end to Lennon’s life and Janis Joplin’s and Jimi Hendrix’s. She seemed to take a certain vindictive satisfaction, shared from afar, when she explained that Carly Simon had written “You’re So Vain” after the hurtful demise of her relationship with JamesTaylor, an early “dis track” long before that vernacular came into existence. Later, it was more widely accepted that the song was about Warren Beatty (Mick Jagger was also a possibility), but whoever he was, Carly put him in his place and my mom was proud of her for it.

She explained the heartache behind “Silver Springs”, Stevie Nicks’ touching 1977 epitaph to another storied love affair gone awry, between Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. It was through these stories and this music that I began to grasp the passion and earnestness behind my mom’s second wave feminism. She worshiped Joni Mitchell but lost patience at times with Joni’s constant lamenting of her toxic relationships. Was her heart broken this time over Jackson Browne, Leonard Cohen, Graham Nash? It pained my mom to see a smart, strong woman held back by men who, at least in my mom’s distant vision, appeared unworthy of her love. 

I learned a lot about my mom’s own psyche from seeing the way songs affected her. Through the albums she loved and their stories, I could get a feel for the way she viewed the world. Having never provided me with a real life example of a happy relationship (through no fault of her own), she painted a picture for me through lilting love songs and crooning blues of the way relationships were really supposed to function properly. The John Lennon song “Julia”, for which I was named, served over any other single track as the soundtrack to my childhood. Plagued by nightmares as a kid, my mom sang to me to help me fall asleep long past my toddler years.

 Half of what I say is meaningless

But I say it just to reach you, Julia

Julia, Julia

Ocean child calls me

So I sing a song of love, Julia

Julia, seashell eyes

Windy smile calls me

So I sing a song of love, Julia

In my forties now, I can still hear her singing this to me, and playing this track from her beloved copy of The White Album over and over throughout my youth. Since my teenage years, my musical horizons have expanded beyond the genres my mom shared with me, as generally happens with succeeding generations. She did her best to be open-minded with the hip-hop and even a little country (not her genre) in my playlists, and she’s stayed pretty hip to newer music as well, discovering both Dave Matthews and Ben Harper before I’d ever heard of them. 

But at the end of the day, the music I’ll always associate most with my mom is the music I grew up on, fond recollections of her prattling on passionately about the absolute groundbreaking brilliance of Mitchell’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns or Carol King’s Tapestry. I see it now. I hold albums, even in their current invisible, intangible form, as sacred as I ever have. I hold them with the reverence my mom taught me. Virtual or vinyl, after all, the best ones are all still treasures.

 Julia Reynolds is a freelance writer, bartender, music lover and, more recently, guesthouse proprietor based (mostly) on the west coast of Sardinia. Her hobbies include getting lost, breaking bones, and taking thousands of pictures of sunsets.