Featured Essay: Warped but Wonderful: My Love Affair with a Flawed Record

by David Chege

There is a special thrill about going through an old dusty pile of vinyl. Sometimes you get just what you want, now and then you stumble across a long-trusted hidden treasure, and sometimes you find something that you really shouldn’t, but works and feels great. In my case, it was a distorted record I discovered when I was still a small collector.

At first glance, it looked ruined, disqualified from any serious shelf. But the minute I turned it on the turntable, I understood this so-called defect was its magic.

The songs were from Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On. It wasn’t rare, just an old soul LP between the discarded bins of easy listening and the dusty walls of discarded disco compilations at a thrift shop. The sleeve was scuffed and the vinyl rippled a little, the sort of warp that makes you hesitate before you drop the needle. I bought it anyway, half expecting to regret it.

The wobble was evident when I placed it on my cheap turntable at home. The needle leaned and the pitch bent in unpredictable ways. Notes gasped and seemed to swim, expanding and collapsing like breathing. It was my first thought that I had made a mistake. The music was not coming out as Gaye had intended, deformed, awry, and off-balance.

But then something shifted. I stopped listening for perfection and started listening to the record as it was. The warps gave the music a strange intimacy, like the record whispered secrets only I could hear. A chorus would dip into a dreamy blur before snapping back into focus. A bassline would bend and groan, making the groove feel alive. What had seemed spoiled became singular. No other copy in the world could sound exactly like this one.

I began to play What’s Going On obsessively. Friends laughed at its uneven sound, but it felt like a companion to me. The warps turned the songs into private performances, imperfect but deeply personal. Each listen reminded me that music is not only about fidelity and polish, it’s about connection. And sometimes connection comes through the cracks.

Possession of a faulty record was a lesson that far transcended vinyl. I became aware of how frequently I had hurled my impossibly high standard of perfection on myself. I wanted all projects, every choice, every element of my being to be smooth, even, and faultless. But the distorted record was my counter-instruction: the flaw can be beautiful. An error can make the ordinary memorable.

There is likewise a certain nostalgia in listening to a mediated record. It’s a reminder that vinyl, unlike digital files, has a body. It can be bent, scarred, or scratched; those marks become part of the story. Every record carries the ghosts of past owners’ fingerprints, dust, and a faint smell of someone else’s home. The warp on my What’s Going On LP was like a scar, proof of survival. It told me that the record had lived before me, and now it was ready to live another life with me.

That realization gave me a new kind of closeness to vinyl culture. Condition is a commonplace fascination among collectors: mint, near mint, excellent plus. The condition is, however, not the whole story. Occasionally, what is valuable is what defies all grading, the oddities that collectors overlook. My imperfect What’s Going On made me realize it is about having a perfect pressing in your collection and building a connection with the sound, an unspeakable thing in its shareable messiness.

After several years, when my collection has expanded and my turntable has been upgraded, I will return to that warped LP. I listen to it when I have to be told that it is not being broken that makes me worthless, that a defect can have its own kind of beauty. My record still wobbles, bends, and breathes in its strange way, and whenever it does, I feel the same intimacy I felt the way it was the first time I listened to them.

Just as it turns out, it is not only about Marvin Gaye or even What’s Going On. It has to do with my communication with the record in how its flaws become my own and how it tells me in its own words that being slightly out of shape does not preclude being loved. The fact is that sometimes, it is the wobble that makes you memorable.

That is the gift of vinyl, at least, the two things I have pointed out: not just the music it carries but the things it can quietly pass along when you listen closely. This is one of my favorite warped but excellent finds, and it will always remain one of my greatest classics simply because of its flaws.

David Chege is a freelance writer with a drive to create compelling content that strikes the chords of readers on a human level. Having worked in various writing disciplines, he is creative, clear-minded, and has an unusual outlook on any project he takes. David is committed to work of the highest caliber, which educates, motivates, and invites fruitful dialogue. Otherwise, when not writing, he likes to discover new things, learn about other cultures, and discover new ways to tell compelling stories.