I Have That on Vinyl

Slint's Accidental Masterpiece, "Spiderland" at 35

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 06:44:00 -0400

Frankly, I’m not sure I have much to say about Slint’s Spiderland that hasn’t already been discussed, but I’m going to try anyway. The seminal 1991 album that was ignored at the time but eventually helped create multiple genres in the span of only six songs has long been viewed as a north star for fans of any guitar-based music that could remotely be considered “underground” since the mid-90s. It was released 35 years ago in March.

My First Record Player

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 16:15:00 -0400

During The Great Purge of 2019 I had to part with many things I didn’t want to part with, one being my first record player, a mid-70s portable model made by RCA. It hadn’t been used in years and was just collecting dust. The only value it had was sentimental. In the late 90s I’d seen one identical to it as part of a rock n’ roll themed exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. If you’ve never seen one, it folds up with the speakers in the back and a built-in handle on top. You can swing the speakers out or detach them for more separation.

Q&A With Mega Infinity

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 05:19:00 -0400

Q&A is a sometimes feature here at IHTOV, where someone is given a set of questions about their record collection. Today’s guests are all from the great band Mega Infinity.

The Joy of Promo Albums in the ‘80s

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 05:19:00 -0400

My original plan was to become a DJ at WKNC-FM when I arrived at N.C. State in the Fall of 1984. I thought there’d be nothing cooler than to play my kind of music on the turntables and give away prizes to the fifth caller. I hung out with Dean Sessions who ran the Nightwave shows that disrupted the stations’ Chainsaw Rock format that dominated the day. Dean even gave me the application so I could get my FCC license.

We Visited Every Record Store in Austin

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:30:00 -0400

Last Fall, Erik, one of my oldest friends (who lives halfway across the country), hit me up and asked, ”If I buy Nine Inch Nails tickets for their Austin show, would you go with me?” Obviously, the answer was “yes,” and we planned a trip for him to spend about a week with us. I told him that I wanted to go to every record store in Austin with him when he’s here. He’s the reason I got into collecting records over 10 years ago, and because of that, I decided he would be the perfect person to go on this adventure with.

This is Happening

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 05:14:00 -0400

I spent most of my first year in Korea listening to LCD Soundsystem’s This Is Happening and wishing I was in New York City. I’d walk through the streets of the small town I was placed in, the night pitch black and silent and I would imagine skyscrapers and noise crowding in around me. I’d listen to This Is Happening, trying to lose myself in the rhythm and pretending that I was anywhere else. Sometimes, I’d imagine I was home, This Is Happening spinning lazily on the record player.

Jarrod

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 05:10:00 -0400

I had no reservations about Jarrod when Mark introduced him as a “friend.” For many months after that, the three of us met up a few times a week almost always at shows. We were in our mid-20s with voracious appetites for music. We had an ear to the ground on local bands and flavor of the week indie rockers. There was never a lack of options.

He Told Me To Wash This Way

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 05:00:00 -0400

My older brother started it. Dave taught me about Rush in the 1970s and let me sit in his room listening to the Marantz stereo setup. I’d kick back with 2112 and read about the temples of Syrinx and its great computers, as Geddy sang and Neal drummed. It was convenient then, to be an audiophile, even if the stereo was in Dave’s bedroom, not mine. He had the whole deal. It helped that Dad sold milk for a living and supplied us with the good plastic milk crates, aka shelving foundation and record storage. Yes, there was a beanbag chair; how did you know?

Those Songs Are Yours Now

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 05:52:00 -0400

It’s 2007 and I’m laying on some shitty guy’s awful mattress on the floor and he has music on the laptop. It sounds familiar, really familiar. I’m pretty sure I know who it is, but I ask anyway- “who is this?” He stops what he’s doing and laughs at me. “You don’t know?” he says, relishing it. “It’s The Shins, I thought you liked them” god damnit, The Shins. Of course it’s The Shins. That’s why it sounds like a jamboree on a spaceship hosted by a very sad but enthusiastic man, which is your favorite style of music.

Is It in My Head? Dissociative Identity, Plurality & Quadrophenia

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 05:33:00 -0400

It’s sometime in fall 2015. A teen is standing along a reservoir dam a bike ride away from their house. They’ve got a journal full of poems about the guy in Germany they’re in love with. The twilight shines over the water, gloom hiding in the shadows. In just a few months they’ll be back here with a bottle of sleeping pills in their hand, trying to keep their balance as they walk along the reservoir dam edge. This was their sea. They wanted to take their own life. For now, they pick up their mountain bike and set off north into the endless trails of the forest. “Can you see the real me?”

A Musical Journey

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 05:08:00 -0400

My memories of listening to Philly soul music on a transistor radio under my pillow after I went to bed, starting when I was seven or eight are very clear and I still love the music from that period, which has been a source of joy and, more recently, sweet feelings of melancholy ever since. As I write this, “Oh Girl” by the Chi-Lites is playing via a Spotify playlist that the service created ‘just for me’ based on my listening habits. There’s something transcendent about that genre of music that opened the floodgates for my love of soul music and all of the other pop music genres that I later came to love and which still hold so much sway over my life.

Pete Yorn: Music For the Morning After

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 04:46:00 -0400

The first time I heard a song from Pete Yorn’s debut album musicforthemorningafter, it was almost a decade old. For the life of me, I still can’t remember exactly how it came across my radar, or which song it was that initially captured my attention. But over the last 16 years, it’s been in regular rotation for me, always there when I need it.

Getting Combat Rock

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 05:28:00 -0400

On Thursday, May 14th, 1982 I was finishing up my second year of college at Rutgers University in New Brunswick NJ. It had been over two years since a high school classmate had turned me into a diehard fan of The Clash by giving me a cassette of his older brother’s copy of London Calling. Since that time, I had pretty much worn out the grooves of my own copy of that record. Sandinista! came out during my freshman year of college and, while I certainly like a lot of it, its breadth of songs and styles, plus its sheer size, meant that I didn’t play it quite as often.

Chasing Frosty the Snowman: From Indonesia to My Own Backyard

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 06:52:00 -0400

Back in 1993, an unlikely band recorded two songs for a holiday single. The band, the Scottish Dream Pop pioneers, The Cocteau Twins. The two songs. Frosty the Snowman and Winter Wonderland. Strange bedfellows indeed.

Life And Death At 33 1/3 RPM

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 05:00:00 -0400

I got my first records when I was three: a Sharon, Lois & Bram album, in recognition of my love of “The Elephant Show” after we got a satellite dish, and a vintage Superman radio drama LP that my aunt found at a yard sale. I couldn’t play them myself, but at every opportunity I would ask my mother to spin them for me.

The Nightmare Returns: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' "Henry's Dream"

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 05:49:00 -0400

When writing my book exploring Nick Cave’s music Darker With The Dawn, I asked many friends for their go-to Bad Seeds record. The results were various, there is so much to praise, and little to dislike or reject–indeed–I would cite Nick Cave as one of the most consistent album artists I’ve ever known.

A Tour of Pour House Pressing

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 05:05:00 -0400

We talk about our love of vinyl records, but have you ever seen where vinyl records come from? I never thought I’d have a chance since the stickers on the back of new albums seem to always declare they were manufactured in distant countries. What are the chances of visiting a factory without renewing my passport? I learned a few months ago that there was a record pressing plant in Raleigh, North Carolina just down the road from me. So I made a call to see if I could visit and they invited me over for a tour.

Paramore’s "This is Why" Inspires a Breakup

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 05:05:00 -0400

It’s January 2023. I sat listening to This is Why’s debut while working from home. Hayley’s words pierced straight into my psyche. It felt like a part of my soul lifted, hearing those lyrics for the first time—an admission. An epiphany.

"Houdini" by the Melvins

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 06:35:00 -0400

As an avid 90s music listener, one band I always felt that’s been overlooked, despite being a prominent band in the alternative rock and grunge world, was The Melvins. Their fifth and most popular release from 1993, Houdini, co-produced by legendary 90s figure and Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, is an album I highly recommend for any other alternative rock listener to indulge themselves in.

I Can't Wait for you to Hear This Someday

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 07:28:00 -0400

My shopping strategy at this point is well established. I head over to the least crowded area and immediately start flipping through the bins, frantically in search of something. I’m never really sure what. I spent the first decade of my career running a record store, which led to a massive collection. Marriage led to an equally massive culling. So, at this stage in the game, my only rule is that any new purchase has to be an album I’m actually going to listen to. I don’t need to own it just to own it.

Songs To Vibe And Be Trans To

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 06:36:00 -0400

…it is easy to forget that the Stonewall riots did in fact take place at a music venue–and many queer liberationist movements, including the much-beloved BashBack! tendency, came out of punk subculture. In these times of fascism, we need a little trans joy, a little inspiration, songs we can mosh to and cry to and even find relatable. So, like the Gallae before me (okay, that’s a high bar, but still), I’d like to share my recently created Trans Joy Mixtape.

How Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly” Shaped a Generation

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 06:17:00 -0400

Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly became a seminal album in the hip-hop space, especially in 2015 when the album was released. From musical influences of jazz and funk blended with Kendrick’s lyricism of political consciousness and overall Black culture in the U.S., the album was universally acclaimed and remains one of the best modern hip-hop albums.

Talking With Keith Carne of We are Scientists

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 05:16:00 -0400

The most important thing, whether you’re talking from a musician, performer, or music appreciator, is to retain that sense of wonder and that sense of connection for what drives your taste, but it’s actually a little bit more primal than that. It’s this thing that moves you. And the truth is that I was moved just as much by American football (the band, not the Packers), as I was, by, for example, Miles Davis’s soundtrack for Lift to the Scaffold, which is just this beautiful, almost ambient jazz record. And, keeping up this balance between, essentially, like, always reminding myself I’m studying this theory so that I can utilize it for expressive purposes.

Closets Have the Best Acoustics

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 05:56:00 -0400

That record player was fantastic. It was a portable player that looked like a suitcase. It was all white with baby-blue trim and a sticker on the front featuring the mouse himself in a red circle, indicative of his club logo. When you opened the player, Mickey’s smiling face greeted you. He was painted on the inside cover, cheerily saying, “Hi Kids!” via a word balloon.

The Pop Music Magpie Diaries

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 06:36:00 -0400

Records are fun. They are large waxy discs containing musical messages, and they are not that serious. I have many records from many places, records of many colours and expressions. Records, records, records, boxes of records to sell, cubes full of the bloody things. I often fib the answer to the question “what was the first record you ever bought” because Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’ was not my first ever record. This is a made-up lie by a made-up liar.

Talking With Dave Holmes

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 06:39:00 -0400

IHTOV correspondent Owen Brazas chatted with former MTV VJ and current Esquire editor Dave Holmes about music discovery, and buying and listening to records.

The Value of Staying Unfinished

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 06:06:00 -0500

In high school, during my prime obsessive music nerd years, I should have been diving headfirst into Joe Jackson, Elvis Costello, The Clash, The Specials, Talking Heads, all that late ’70s magic. Instead, I had my heels dug in like a stubborn mule. Punk? New Wave? Short hair and suits? Absolutely not. As anyone with a functioning brain knew, today’s music sucked.

I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 05:59:00 -0500

I have a litany of albums that take me through those treacherous times—new albums by Soccer Mommy and Ratboys, old albums I’ve accumulated through the years like Aztec Camera’s High Land Hard Rain and Joe Jackson’s Look Sharp. These albums buoy me, make me feel comfort when I need it most. It’s Bright Eyes’ I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning that really permeates my heart, that gets me through some awful times, globally and personally.

Musical Impressionism: Music about Places

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 05:34:00 -0500

I recently had the pleasure of traveling from Oslo, Norway to Budapest, Hungary, taking every form of transportation imaginable. On the flight to Oslo, in preparation for my visit to the Fram museum, I finished reading My Life as an Explorer: Autobiography of the First Man to Reach the South Pole by Roald Amundsen. It helped put my mind in a place that could fully appreciate the ship and the significance of the items contained within the museum. All the while, I kept finding myself humming along to Our Retired Explorer (Dines with Michel Foucault in Paris, 1961) by The Weakerthans and repeating “Oh Antarctica” over and over again.

Miracles Take Longer

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 06:19:00 -0500

Recently I got my hands on a Numero Group re-issue of “Like a Ship…(Without A Sail)” by Pastor T.L. Barrett and the Youth For Christ Choir, recorded in 1971. The history behind the album is quite simple: a Protestant pastor sings alone over some funk-soul lines, a drum set, an organ, and a bass played by amateurs, all the while supported by a gospel choir of youngsters.

Experiencing Rush through Vinyl

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 06:00:00 -0500

My adventures in acquiring this collection of Rush’s vinyl discography began in December of 2019 and it changed who I am and how I relate and listen to music. So come with me as I explore some of my vinyl highlights, listed chronologically in the order they were bought.

All the Lives I’ll Never Live: Wandering Through Time on Vinyl

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 06:39:00 -0500

I grew tired of seeing freshly pressed albums on vinyl in trendy stores like Urban Outfitters or Indigo without a way to take up the hobby myself. I asked for and received my first record player for Christmas in 2017 and never looked back. As a university student commuting to and from the city each day, I soon discovered a world entirely new to me, that of the urban record store.

Easy Livin'

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 05:39:00 -0500

One of my favorite places in Park Ridge was Rainbow Records. During its heyday in the 1970s and ‘80s it was about three miles from my home, located in the city’s shopping district across from the train station my dad passed by twice daily. I rode there on my bike, down streets with very little traffic, and as long as the weather permitted.

On Peter Gabriel's "Melt" and Steve Biko

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 05:38:00 -0500

The song they are playing is called “Games Without Frontiers.” I like it immediately. There’s really never been anything Gabriel I didn’t like, so this would prove to be no exception. The song features Kate Bush singing a refrain that left me, and everyone else, perplexed. We have no idea what she’s saying and the deejay is no help. In fact, he wants us to interpret what she is singing and call into the station with our answers.

How to Listen to Records

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 05:20:00 -0500

The following essay is a recent essay from Mike Monteiro’s newsletter where he answers a reader question a week. Since this week’s essay was about records I reached out to him and asked if we could reprint it on IHTOV. If you have a question for Mike, about records or anything else, feel free to ask it here.

People!

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 04:57:00 -0500

People! All I know about them has been gleaned from a few scattered blog posts across the internet: Formed by brothers Geoff and Robert Levin in 1966, People!’s star started rising in San Jose when a local DJ known as Captain Mikey began to champion them, eventually becoming their manager and turning them into a beloved act in the Bay Area.

Laughing Ourselves to Sleep

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 06:41:00 -0500

My musical awareness first stirred with namby-pamby pop music on an AM transistor radio. I became musically aware in teen-dom, and at 12 bought an FM radio-cassette the size of a cereal box. With a morning newspaper route at oh-dark-thirty, I carried it on my bicycle for company, stocking it with cassettes from a Columbia House deal — 13 for 1¢, then eight over two years at regular Club prices, something like $137.98 each. I didn’t know how to pick music then, so my haul was a mixed bag from embarrassing to accidentally great.

The Love Songs Of Our Lives

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 04:58:00 -0500

I asked readers of IHTOV to write blurbs about their favorite love songs, and the response was great. Enjoy these little verses about songs of love.

All Vinyl, All the Time - Capitol Hill’s Revolver Bar

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 06:41:00 -0500

Tucked away on the edge of Capitol Hill is a small unassuming bar. Warm red light emanates from the doorway, beckoning you in on a cold wet Seattle evening. Stepping through the door of Revolver Bar is like stepping into the 70s, complete with a midcentury modern starburst clock and retro TVs adorning either end of the bar. Revolver Bar has a simple motto: all vinyl, all the time. Opened in 2014, Revolver has been spinning vinyl for the Seattle masses for eleven years, and I was lucky enough to work there for the last two.

The Understated Brilliance of Bedhead's "Transaction de Novo"

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 05:09:00 -0500

In recent years, there has been a swell of slowcore revival and neo-slowcore bands springing up, thanks in part to TikTok and burgeoning interest in the formerly niche genre by Zoomers. One band that’s inspired many of them, yet still seems to float under the radar, is Bedhead, a 90s group from Wichita Falls, Texas.

J Dilla's "Donuts" at 20 Years

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 04:49:00 -0500

Today marks the 20th anniversary of James Yancy AKA J Dilla’s masterful, essential, and final album, Donuts. It’s a record that’s deservedly been written about ad nauseum due to its influence, its own sample-based work being re-sampled continuously, and its inspiration on generations of producers and rappers who’ve followed.

The Loneliness of the Night Drive: How 90s Trip-Hop Soundtracked Emotional Escape

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 05:14:00 -0500

There’s a peculiar intimacy to driving alone at night. The streets are empty, the city lights blur into streaks against the windshield, and the hum of the engine becomes a private rhythm. For many of us growing up in the 1990s, that solitude was soundtracked by trip-hop: the shadowy beats, languid basslines, and ethereal voices of artists like Massive Attack, Portishead, and Tricky.

More Than I Bargained For: My Year With IHTOV

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 06:09:00 -0500

on that otherwise forgettable Sunday night in captivity, a post popped up that would somehow, improbably knock me out of my post-op ennui. A post that would have ramifications I never would have imagined when I decided, uncharacteristically, to hit send on a reply.

The Best Cut Is The Deepest – In Praise of Record Compilations

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 04:44:00 -0500

For every band’s best or most popular album, there is a compilation that stands far above it, if not, as its equal. Whether it’s a traditional Best-Of, singles collection, oddities or even a fan-made bootleg, these sometimes random selections can better express a band’s unique character; marking their key development or artistic peaks, better than the most skipless record, trimming the fat of filler tracks and going straight to the heavy stuff.

From Pub to Producer: Reviving my dad’s Mod days

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 06:06:00 -0500

“Being a Mod was like a religion. We would eat, sleep and talk Mod—the music, the fashion, the scooters. You were in your own world, not following orders, with enough of you to be something.” That’s what I quoted my dad in the pitch deck of Revival.

Pac-Man Fever

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 06:16:00 -0500

There’s something to be said about the power of old video games and novelty music. As a kid, video games were few and far between in my household. We thrived on the power of imagination. Ok. We were poor. We’re talking tinfoil-wrapped-around-cardboard-swords poor. We liked He-Man, Ghostbusters, Transformers, and arcade games. But we didn’t have any home consoles until my dad bought an Atari 2600, with a copy of Pac-Man. Yeah…it was the worst version of the game that everyone hates. THAT version of Pac-Man.

Low’s Things We Lost in the Fire Turns 25

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 04:51:00 -0500

One of my hottest music takes is that Low – the notoriously quiet, understated, slowcore pioneers from Duluth, Minnesota, who happen to be Mormon – may be one of the five greatest American bands. Between 1994 and 2022, they released 13 mostly excellent albums that explored the beauty of minimalism with two-part vocal harmonies; the fractured, noisy, electronic, and the space in between those two sonic extremes. Things We Lost in the Fire, released on January 22, 2001, represented a turning point for the band, led by husband and wife Alan Sparhawk and the late Mimi Parker.

The Haunting Sound of Nostalgia: Why 80s Synth Pop Still Feels Like Halloween

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 05:10:00 -0500

The first time I realized that 80s synth pop felt like Halloween had nothing to do with costumes or horror movies. It was a late October evening, and “Lullaby” by The Cure came on through my headphones, that crawling bassline, the whispery strings, the way Robert Smith’s voice sounded half-alive, half-dreaming. Outside, the sky was bruised orange and purple, the light slipping faster than usual. Something about those synths, glossy but sad, mechanical yet human, felt like the season itself. They didn’t scare me, but they unsettled me in a way I wanted to return to, like remembering a dream you can’t quite shake.

Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 06:36:00 -0500

This was 1971. The Vietnam War was raging, and protests had sprung up around my little suburban town. I knew of them from my older cousin Fran, a dyed-in-the-wool hippie and pacifist. She would babysit my sisters and I while my parents were out bowling or attending some firehouse function, and she would tell me stories about protesting, teach me about the war, and guide me towards the light of peace and love. I was an eager student and absorbed every lesson, taking the talk of pacifism to my heart.

Big Mama Thornton's "Jail"

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 05:14:00 -0500

Looking back, one might think that the music business did not treat her well, and that she made some bad choices. Despite an obvious vocal talent, an original, compelling voice, and a charismatic stage presence, she never had the breakthrough that many thought she deserved.

A Hymn in the Machine

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 05:10:00 -0500

What happened seven years later could have been further from what I wanted. Still, it was precisely what I needed to take the first step into a life that aligned with my personal values, many of which were awakened within me by one of the most influential black metal artists of our times - Hulder. I own a copy of her debut full-length album, Godslastering: Hymns of a Forlorn Peasantry, and a signed copy of The Eternal Fanfare, both on vinyl.

In Memory Far Away - Old 97's Drag it Up

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 05:09:00 -0500

The drawn-out twang of Ken Bethea’s guitar rang throughout the cabin of my Dodge Intrepid as a thick cloud of odorous smoke bounced off the windshield. This was my routine. A mini road trip back to campus following a weekend at home, soundtracked by a revolving door of albums that found their way into the car’s CD player. One record made the rotation more often than the others: Drag It Up by Old 97’s.

A Short Guide to Zappa Albums

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 05:10:00 -0500

As a Frank Zappa fan and musician, people often come up to me and say, “hey, where do I get started with FZ’s music?” Well, I’ve got an answer for ya.

Bob Weir: The God of Gaps

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 05:45:00 -0500

That’s what I’ve always admired about him – in a band that was not afraid of taking chances on stage, he was the guy who was willing to take the swings that the other guys weren’t. and was willing to be a polarizing figure among deadheads because of it. Keyboardist Tom Constanten left the band in 1970, and you can actively hear him stepping into those gaps on Dick’s Picks 4.

A Vinyl Love Story

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 05:45:00 -0500

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).

Chic's "Risque"

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 04:08:00 -0500

That only made the question of where I got it more curious, because most of my education in 60s-70s black radio staples have come from them. There was the roommate who gave me their copies of Let’s Stay Together and Purple Rain gifted to them by someone they dated and broke up with. As far as I can tell, if you have to buy someone Let’s Stay Together, it’s already over, and you’re just jingling the change in your pockets, asking to play.

Such Great Heights: on the Postal Service and Loneliness

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 05:19:00 -0500

There are albums in my life that act as a therapeutic friend who I only see a couple times a year, but is always there to pick up lost pieces of me. They don’t put me back together, they gingerly place the pieces in my hand and offer directions to a way back. One album in particular has grown with me over two decades and knows exactly when to play for me, usually at my loneliest.

Kings of Numbers: The Police at a Fearsome Zenith

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 05:50:00 -0500

The Police are a controversial band, artistically speaking. There are toes I’m treading on, among people whose opinions I value, by vouching for them. They’ve heard it all before on the brilliance of the band, and are unmoved. Same for another faction if I give them a roasting. They’ve heard it all before in that direction. I’m naturally writing for both parties here.

There Are Break-up Albums and Then There’s Transatlanticism

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 05:20:00 -0500

I headed west on 15th Street and got on the West Side Highway with the late afternoon winter sun creeping down towards the Palisades. Over a gust of humming white noise, the album’s opening track exploded into crashing guitars for a solid 45 seconds before parting for Ben Gibbard’s opening lament: “So this is the new year / and I don’t feel any different.”

Gene Joins the Band – The Dave Brubeck Quartet in Europe

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 06:46:00 -0500

My grandfather’s brother David was born, raised, and lived out his life in Buffalo, New York. A prizefighter in his younger days, a confirmed bachelor drifting through life, he enjoyed the nightlife and loved jazz. I never met him; he died young. Somehow, I ended up with his vinyl, or at least some of it: Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, George Shearing, and others. One of my favorites is a rather obscure Dave Brubeck Quartet album, a recording of a concert performed in Copenhagen in the spring of 1958 released on Columbia as The Dave Brubeck Quartet in Europe.

Vinyl Memories

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 05:47:00 -0500

There are some LP’s I’ve played so much they are part of my DNA; there are some I don’t remember having. I’m sure I could find them all on Spotify, and there are duplicates among my CD’s (about 10 feet, but a CD case is around twice as thick as an LP and its cardboard cover). But the hunt for something to put on the turntable is a trip through the gamut of my changing tastes over some sixty years, a wandering through an antique store versus a patting of my mental pockets for something to play on Spotify.

My Father: A Life in Vinyl

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 05:01:00 -0500

In some ways, he won the ultimate prize, becoming friends with people he grew up listening to. Being famous among famous people. He got to visit, and live in places he grew up dreaming about like London, New York, and countless others. Today, his record collection is important to me and my mom, not because of a storied career, but because it really reminds us that despite achieving much of his impossible dream, nothing was more important to him than his family.

WALK OUT TO WINTER: falling in love with—and to—Aztec Camera's High Land, Hard Rain

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 05:00:00 -0500

As I do when it snows this hard, I place Aztec Camera’s High Land, Hard Rain on the turntable and settle in. It’s my favorite album of all time, a title I gave it just a few weeks ago.

A Christmas Song for People Who Don't Do Happy Endings

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 05:18:00 -0500

I can’t resist the Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York.” Now, that’s just tragedy song porn. From the opening piano chords, I can literally feel my chest sink. Then rise when it turns into an Irish jig and Kirsty MacColl jumps in to liven things up. When Shane MacGowan wistfully sings, “I could have been someone,” with MacColl replying, “Well, so could anyone,” I’m committed to at least five more consecutive listens.

Anti-Christmas Tunes

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 05:17:00 -0500

But let’s face it, there’s a lot to be bummed about. There’s the rise of fascism, genocide, climate catastrophe, and you want me to get excited about a fresh pair of socks and some dry ass ham? I work midnights, so I don’t see the sun from mid October to April. There’s just nothing you can stuff in a stocking that’s gonna kill those blues. So here are some songs I instead choose to wallow in.

Christmas in the Heart, and on My Turntable

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 05:26:00 -0500

Two of my earliest memories of recorded music are: 1) hearing Bob Dylan’s voice; and 2) listening to Christmas records. It never occurred to me that these threads would intertwine but in 2009, they did, in the form of Dylan’s Christmas in the Heart album. My December listening habits haven’t been the same since then.

Holiday with the Cartwrights: Bonanza Christmas On The Ponderosa

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 06:12:00 -0500

What was my favorite Christmas album from my youth? I could act cool and claim a holiday song collection by Elvis, Dean Martin or even the Beach Boys. That would be a massive lie. My parents didn’t own any of those albums in the small record collection that we lugged across the Atlantic Ocean.

Talking With Jay Darlington of Kula Shaker, Part 3

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 06:07:00 -0500

Part 3 of an extensive interview with Jay Darlington

A Charlie Brown Christmas

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 06:52:00 -0500

…when I saw A Charlie Brown Christmas peeking back at me from a crate of well-loved vinyl in that flea market stall, I grabbed it and ran to Daddy before someone else could take it. Daddy gave me the $1 bill to give to the man and my prize was all mine.

A Christmas Not So Merry: Dark Mark Does Christmas

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 06:52:00 -0500

In 2012 Lanegan self-released a tour-only Christmas EP under the moniker of “Dark Mark.” In 2020, it was expanded to a full album and reissued again independently. The album Dark Mark Does Christmas is a journey through the spiritual and the bleak, very reminiscent of Scrooge standing in front of the headstone that bears his name.

I Dream Of Christmas

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 05:19:00 -0500

Music is one of the ways we all connect to Christmas. No matter what religion we are or what we celebrate, we can’t escape knowing all the lyrics to “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town. The Christmas industrial complex has been diabolically brilliant about spreading Christmas music out of every speaker for a few weeks out of every year.

Meet the Beatles

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 05:13:00 -0500

We were huge Beatlemaniacs and already owned their previous releases. I spent most of my allowance on vinyl. Marsha and I sometimes combined our money to shop for albums at Wallich’s Music City in the heart of Hollywood. Located on the corner of Sunset and Vine, Wallich’s was the place to go for concert tickets, sheet music, LPs, 45s, 8-track and cassette tapes, musical instruments, and even TVs.

A Zine About a Website About Records

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 10:12:00 -0500

I Have That on Vinyl is a website in the original sense of the word. It doesn’t have an algorithm, you don’t have to have an account, it’s not selling your data to Palantir or whatever, just records and stories about records. IHTOV is old school internet.

Talking with Jay Darlington of Kula Shaker, Part 2

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 06:35:00 -0500

IHTOV correspondent Owen Brazas spoke at length with Jay Darlington of Kula Shaker. This is a part 2.

Open Hand

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 05:25:00 -0500

Vinyl records are like watches – there’s no real need for them anymore, but try telling that to a collector. Do and you’ll discover as many reasons to collect as there are collectors. As an elder millennial who grew up spinning records at home, literally wearing out tapes—first 8-track and then cassette—in the car, and witnessing the dawn of digital music, I take an only-the-sentimental-hits approach.

Talking to Jay Darlington of Kula Shaker

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 06:01:00 -0500

IHTOV correspondent Owen Brazas spoke at length with Jay Darlington of Kula Shaker. This is a three parter. Part 2 will be posted Thursday, Part 3 on Saturday.

First Anniversary

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 04:50:00 -0500

On the first anniversary of IHTOV

Introducing: The IHTOV Zine

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 13:26:00 -0500

In honor of IHTOV’s first anniversary on December 17th, we have made a zine commemorating ten pieces from over the course of that year, chosen by a small committee.

How To Love

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 05:14:00 -0500

My girlfriend gifting me that album is what etched her into my childhood memories of What’s The 411?, of riding around in the car with my mom, in my eternal crush on Mary J. Blige, of youth, of how fleeting time is.

Q&A With Scott O'Kelley

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 04:59:00 -0500

Q&A is an occasional column where people from all walks of life answer questioins about their record collection

Christmas Music Selections

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 04:55:00 -0500

My listening covers a wide expanse; I love the standards (the Drifter’s version of “White Christmas” tops my chart), but I also love a treasure trove of covers of those classics (Bright Eyes has an

Talking With John Darnielle

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 04:55:00 -0500

So This feels like an errand of middle age to me, understanding that, the stuff that thrilled and fed you, if it’s actual stuff, its mission going forward is to travel from you to the outside world where it can do that for somebody else

The Beastie Boys and Me

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 09:14:00 -0500

A small history of important Beastie Boys events in my life

Hot and Nasty: Black Oak Arkansas and Their Self-Titled Debut

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 05:11:00 -0500

Let’s see…gray beard? Check. Slightly overweight? Check. Bad left knee? Check. The inability to find new music that hits like it did 30 years ago. Sadly, for this aging Gen Xer, check. Before you think of me as some curmudgeon that’s stuck in an imaginary utopia where music and culture peaked in the 90’s, let me state that I am always on the lookout for new artists and bands that deliver a sonic dopamine hit to the pleasure centers in my brain. However

The Doors and Me

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 18:39:00 -0500

The Doors are one of those bands you discovered intrinsically back in the 70s. No older cousin passed them down to you, no friends said, “Hey, you have to listen to this.” They were just on the radio a lot

My Life in Vinyl

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 05:20:00 -0500

My husband has been saying vinyl records are going to make a comeback. “You wait and see. We’re not getting rid of our albums.” Yeah, I’ve been trying to get him to sell those albums on eBay for a couple of decades or to a collector. We’re both members of the Boomer generation born in the 50s. And although I’ve adapted and wholly embraced digital media including music, I was a baby rocker born and bred in the 50s, hooked on the vinyl records before my first birthday.

Q&A With Musician and Music Writer Will Sisskind

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 05:10:00 -0500

Q&A is an occasional series where people talk to us about their record collections. Today we welcome musician Will Sisskind.

The Rise and Fall of the Triple Album

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 05:09:00 -0500

Recently, Jeff Tweedy released a triple album, Twilight Override, 30 tracks gathered in one place. The announcement made me think back to when I was a kid, in the record store, caressing the hefty Yessongs album with the legendary Roger Dean cover, lamenting the price, wondering if I would ever have the courage to spend that much money – it seemed a fortune – on a record. Ah, the triple album, vinyl’s indulgent dinosaur, two hours of either well-earned bliss or buyer’s remorse.

Hold the Line: a breakup story starring Toto

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 05:04:00 -0500

Everyone was singing it. The old, the young, the toothless, the drunk, the surfing Santa. It was almost robotic, in a sense..

Nate Patrin on Traffic's "The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys"

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 04:55:00 -0500

One of the things I miss the most about my early years of crate digging was the thrilling feeling of displacement I felt every time I stumbled across an unfamiliar old secondhand LP with an unconventional sleeve[…]

Skating on Records: Bob Marley or Bon Jovi?

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 05:33:00 -0500

My father loves music but maybe more than the music itself, he loves the ritual of slipping a disc out of its jacket, blowing delicately on it to rid it of dust particles before placing it tenderly on the player. I see the love with which he moves the needle to the grooves, hear the familiar crackling and popping before melodic tunes fill the air around us. His face melts into serenity and he belts out the words with gusto, sometimes, dancing. He loves what he loves unabashedly and I absorb this from him without realizing it.

Letter From the Publisher

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 09:51:00 -0500

This is for all the wonderful, talented people who have contributed to IHTOV, or who have pieces pending, and for all future writers for the site.

Welcome to Frank Black Friday

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 04:46:00 -0500

Oh, you don’t know about Frank Black Friday? Read on to learn all about Frank Black Friday and more as PopMatters pals Rich Wilhelm and Chris Ingalls present an oral history of how their separate 30-year relationships with Teenager of the Year, the second solo album released by Pixies singer/guitarist/songwriter Frank Black, eventually merged into a joint relationship.

A Little Ska, a Lot of Thanksgiving Memories

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 04:51:00 -0500

The stereo cabinet in my living room is mostly silent throughout the year. My late mother spent a pretty penny on the system, right down to its premier turntable. Before it wound up out of commission though, it was the place where me and my family would throw on some vinyl to fill the entire downstairs floor with music. That was especially true on holidays and in the days leading up to them. These days, I think about Thanksgiving the most, because that was when the record player set the mood for my mother and for me.

Giving Thanks

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 04:44:00 -0500

I have this image in my head and I know that while it is based on true events, it is a composite sketch of listening to music in my childhood. I’m standing in front of the stereo cabinet - a piece of furniture that contained the turntable, AM/FM receiver and, behind the doors of the oak cabinet, a television. I didn’t care about the tv. I only cared about that turntable and the collection of records my mother had.

Records My Grandfather Left Behind

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 05:08:00 -0500

I had just attained twelve years, with no idea about what actually was a vinyl record. The turntable was almost broken, when I placed the first record - Sam Cooke “A Change is Gonna Come” my room filled with a fragile crackle even before the music came alive, this made me understand immediately that: this was not just an inheritance, but initiation.

Three Records That Won’t Require Song-Skipping During Thanksgiving Dinner

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 04:07:00 -0500

Christmas music is for the day after Thanksgiving, not the day of. Playing Christmas music too early can be confusing. But that can make choosing the right dinner playlist for a family get-together in 2025 a little tricky.

The Record That Taught Me to Pray: How Nina Simone Became My Thanksgiving Religion

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 04:21:00 -0500

When I was a kid, Thanksgiving wasn’t about turkey or mashed potatoes. It wasn’t about the cranberry sauce or the football game on TV. Thanksgiving was about music. Every year, my aunt would pull out her worn copy of Nina Simone’s Pastel Blues, carefully lifting it from its sleeve, and before anyone had touched a fork, she’d set the needle down and let the record spin.

The Needle and the Memory: How a Cracked Record Saved My Family Thanksgiving

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 04:16:00 -0500

Every Thanksgiving in my house used to sound like a kind of chaos only love could make sense of pots clanging in the kitchen, cousins yelling over each other about football, the smell of collard greens and cinnamon, and my father humming off-key to whatever soul record was spinning in the corner. Usually, it was Bill Withers. Always Bill Withers.

For the Love of Vinyl

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 06:15:00 -0500

I could wax poetic about the deep love I have for vinyl all day long. The elegance of the mechanical arm floating to the spinning record, to where the needle kisses the vinyl, and you hear that first pop, right before the music begins. It was magic. Say what you will, sound on vinyl is the clearest, most pure sound I have experienced. The moment I put the headphones on, and heard the stereophonic sounds flowing like waves into my ears, I was lifted to another place.

The Jesus & Mary Chain’s “Psychocandy” at 40 Years Old

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 11:19:00 -0500

While the world has been focused on two temperamental brothers from the United Kingdom with a love/hate relationship in 2025, a different, mercurial pair, Jim and William Reid from Scotland, celebrate the 40th anniversary of their groundbreaking album, Psychocandy. The Jesus & Mary Chain’s debut has arguably had a greater impact on modern guitar music than any album since The Velvet Underground & Nico (which, of course, also heavily inspired this album’s sound, style, and substance) or the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Are You Experienced?.

Feelin’ Good Vibes

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 05:15:00 -0500

My coworkers were all older than me, which I loved. Laura, the assistant manager, was eighteen, with platinum-dyed spiked hair like Billy Idol, though her favorite singer was Adam Ant. She had just returned from a trip to London that had heavily influenced her look and her outlook. She always wore big black punky boots, a T-shirt, and vest. I found her to be worldly and smart.

My Musical Pleasures

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 04:55:00 -0500

In the year 1956 there was a new force in the music world. The energetic new Rock and roll music was quickly emerging as a dominating force. And I was at the right age to be swept up in it. It was peculiar to me that my older brother, by three years, didn’t seem to be much affected by it though. He being a young teenager was listening to the likes of Johnny Mathis, the Platters, Mantovani, the Three Suns, Rusty Draper, and other such dorky music, mostly on 78 rpm records.

From Copacabana to Clampdown

Wed, 05 Nov 2025 06:37:00 -0500

Every other Friday after he got off work, we would drive across town to meet my mom. I would get out of dad’s car, having just listened to something like The Lovin’ Spoonful or The Guess Who, and get into my mom’s Fiat 124 where she was listening to Styx or The Cars. It always took my brain a few minutes to adjust. Her music was more energetic and full of life. The guitars were fuzzy and the drums were right there in the foreground. It was exciting music, and it meant an end to the drudgery of the school week. The beginning of the weekend. Let the good times roll.

Garfield, Odie, and the Dead Vinyl Years

Tue, 04 Nov 2025 14:23:00 -0500

I am sitting here at 3 a.m. on Election Day morning, watching a Garfield and Friends episode. I have never seen a Garfield and Friends episode before—it’s just not my choice of animated shows—but I’m watching this one because a) i am high, and b) it is about Jon Arbuckle’s record player. It’s about seven minutes long, and that is probably seven minutes too long to be watching Garfield and Friends, especially at 3 a.m.

Stones for Breakfast

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 05:19:00 -0500

I got to see Elvis on November 25th, 1956 — one day before my twelfth birthday — at the Louisville Armory. His paternal grandparents lived in Louisville. Two days before the show, teenagers ripped up all the grass on their front lawn as devotional relics, which I’m confident some continue to cherish.

How Doo Wop Saved Me

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 04:25:00 -0500

Doo wop is Sunday evenings when I’m about 10 years old, WCBS-FM playing on the stereo in the kitchen (my dad built speakers into the kitchen walls) while we have our snack of waffles and ice cream before watching The Wonderful World of Disney. I can hear it now, maybe it’s “Maybe” by the Chantels or the Flamingos with “I Only Have Eyes for You.” It feels good, it feels warm. Our kitchen is a place of comfort, and I feel loved.

Welcome to my Nightmare

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 06:06:00 -0400

Let’s be clear – Freddy vs. Jason is not a good movie. It’s not wretched, but it’s not good. But it is a lot of fun, and has some decent horror movie sequences scattered throughout. Again, even as an aspiring film major to be, I wasn’t necessarily the most discerning at the time. I simply wanted to have a good time and not be at work on the farm.

When the Monster Mash Met My Mixtape

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 04:51:00 -0400

I’ve always measured October not by the calendar but by the sound of eerie synths, offbeat laughter, and the occasional thunderclap that sneaks through my speakers. The first sign of Halloween for me isn’t the plastic pumpkins in stores, it’s when I drop the needle on “Monster Mash” and the familiar crackle announces spooky season is officially open.

A Trans Halloween Playlist

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 04:50:00 -0400

Halloween is rapidly approaching, and with it comes a sense of haphazard openness—a sense that anyone can present how they want to, that we can celebrate the things that frighten us, that any costume or event is possible with a little DIY ethos. Of course, it doesn’t take a queer theorist to know that this sounds like something else.

A Love Letter to Boogie Records, the Stuff of Rock and Roll Dreams

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 04:05:00 -0400

Boogie Records occupied a triangular peninsula that pointed like an arrowhead into the intersection of Stadium Drive and West Michigan Avenue, two wide and busy roads at the bottom of the hilly neighborhood where I grew up near Kalamazoo College. Like the parcel of land it sat on, the store itself resembled an isosceles triangle or, perhaps more fitting, the planchette for a Ouija board. The entrance was at the narrow point. Beyond it lay the stuff of rock and roll dreams.

Nova Mob - The Last Days of Pompeii - Rough Trade 1991

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 05:11:00 -0400

Before they called it grunge, before Seattle, before Subpop, there was Minneapolis in the mid-80’s. Young men in baggy clothes in basements, suffering through long cold winters with aggressive, chaotic hardcore, distorted guitars and savaged drumheads, lager and amphetamines. There came the Replacements and Soul Asylum and others, of course, but the most savage and frenetic of the 80’s Minneapolis bands was Husker Du.

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness at 30

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 04:37:00 -0400

One of the albums that was in the rotation once I got a Discman was Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness by The Smashing Pumpkins. With its two-hour run time, it was a perfect album to bookend the day’s long bus rides - Dawn To Dusk (Disc 1) on the dark and cold morning bus ride, and decompressing from the day on the seemingly longer hour ride home with Twilight To Starlight (Disc 2).

It Took Us Years to Figure Out

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 04:42:00 -0400

The next two tracks—“I’ve Been Waiting” (more on that later) and “Girlfriend,” the breakthrough single, which puts the power in power pop and features Quine’s blistering guitar—take over where “Divine Intervention” left off. Ah, who am I kidding, the next eleven tracks continue the formula, presenting a masterclass in guitar rock that mixes winsome ballads and hopeful uptempo songs with sad and bitter breakup songs…

The 45s of My Youth: You Don't Have to Say You Love Me

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:54:00 -0400

A woman’s voice kicks in, sweet and sorrowful. It gives me chills. It is my introduction to Dusty Springfield’s “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” and it changes me.

Q&A With Craig and Suzy from Underneath the Lookout

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 04:18:00 -0400

Q&A is a regular column at IHTOV where people answer a list of questions about their favorite records. Today we welcome, from England, Craig and Suzy of Underneath the Lookout

The Story of Woof! A Dog Opera

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 04:56:00 -0400

Jake is a vinyl head, so, like anybody who makes music, he has always dreamed of getting his own music pressed onto vinyl. Woof! was the perfect project to press onto vinyl. Two succinct acts, ideally placed for flipping the record over and enjoying. Mixed by Jake, mastered by Zac Thomas at the Jam Room in Columbia, SC, and pressed by Kindercore in Athens, GA (RIP).

How a Punk Compilation Album Changed the Way I Teach

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 03:41:00 -0400

Punk spoke to me—its rawness, vulnerability, and noisy sonic waves that vibrated my ear drums. But most of all, I identified with the DIY ethos of punk. I reflected on how my work with Go Baby Go and modifying toy cars for young children with disabilities aligned with the punk ideals of DIY, social justice, and resisting normativity.

From Copacabana to Clampdown

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 05:09:00 -0400

I have a lot of memories from when I was a kid of riding in my dad’s Buick station wagon while we listened to oldies on the radio. He wasn’t one to sing along, but he had this incredible, encyclopedic knowledge of the pop music of the fifties and sixties that he was always sharing. He knew all the band names, who the different members were, and why they broke up. And while the music just felt dated to me, I loved to listen to him talk about it.

When Bad Albums Happen to Good People

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 03:47:00 -0400

“Southbound Suarez” and “Fool in the Rain” did nothing to dispel my unease. What the fuck is this? Where are the screeching guitars and pounding drums and Robert Plant’s plaintive wails? This felt so tame. I was willing to keep going, though, hoping there would be at least one song to cling to. And then “Hot Dog” came on.

Life in a Glass House

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 06:28:00 -0400

All of which is to say that I loved Billy Joel because I loved my dad. I loved that he’d moved 300 miles away from Farmingdale to some little rural town (the Hudson River line would only take you part of the way) to raise his family, to raise me. And I loved the glimpse into his native Long Island, mythical and vanished in his telling, an expanse of aircraft factories and potato fields when he was growing up.

Q&A With Musician Leilani Patao

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 05:07:00 -0400

Q&A is a recurring feature on IHTOV where people answer some standard questions about their collection. Today we welcome artist Leilani Patao

Eight Records for a Penny: record clubs and me

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 04:22:00 -0400

Parade magazine that arrived in the Sunday newspaper. The Columbia Record Club advertised furiously with two pages that listed all the cool records that you order directly from them. The mail-in coupon declared that I could get 8 albums for the price of a single penny. Just write down my selections, tape a penny to the card and drop it in the mail box.

Fall Into Winter: songs for seasonal transition

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 09:34:00 -0400

The weather forecast for next week looks like this: hoodies, boots, football, electric blanket. It will only top out in the mid 60s during the day, 40s at night. The sun will set at 6:20 tonight, but it will start to feel like the day is over by five as the autumn shadows make themselves known. There’s only one thing to do when this happens. Let’s play some records.

How Playing A DIY Show Got Me Back Into Vinyl Collecting

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 05:28:00 -0400

love vinyl. I collected records as a kid (45s, specifically), switched to CDs as a teenager, then got back into vinyl as an adult. By my last count, I officially have a crapton of records and CDs in my house, give or take a few. But what got me back into vinyl? It’s not easy to say, but I think one specific show really did the trick - and it was a DIY, “DM for address” show to boot.

Test the Meddle: a mother-daughter interview and short story

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 05:23:00 -0400

…there was a smudge of blue: my mom’s copy of Pink Floyd’s Meddle. I held it aloft and she lit up: “I used to listen to that all the time in my first apartment!” For this piece, I called her up to talk about the album and about the time she stabbed a guy.

Q&A With BRNDA's Leah Gage and Dave Lesser

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 04:09:00 -0400

Today on Q&A, we’re featuring Leah Gage and Dave Lesser of BRNDA

Same As It Ever Was? The Many Versions of Stop Making Sense

Sat, 27 Sep 2025 04:27:00 -0400

The Talking Heads album Stop Making Sense is one of my favorite live albums. So much that I have developed an obsessive relationship with it. I would argue that this is not entirely my fault. Had Talking Heads actually released the movie soundtrack on the “soundtrack” album, then my obsession would never have developed.

Echoes in the Groove: A Forgotten Jazz Record and My Father's Memory

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 04:01:00 -0400

Sound becomes something bigger than sound in life. It turns into memory, existence, and even curing. Several years after my father had died, I happened to find an outdated vinyl record, hidden away in the back of a box in the attic. It was the Blue Train by John Coltrane, which had been his record.

Q&A With Pascal Brugger of aeon

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 04:36:00 -0400

Q&A Remix is a frequent column on IHTOV in which people from all walks of life answer a set of questions about their vinyl collection. Today we welcome musician Pascal Brugger of aeon

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

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 05:46:00 -0400

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.

Analogue Meets Digital: The World of the Vinyl DJ YouTuber

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 04:29:00 -0400

when a thumbnail of a familiar looking two turntable set up came up on my feed, I was intrigued. The channel, Analog Mixtape aka Mark Garitson, is part of a growing niche on YouTube of vinyl only DJ sets. There are several channels dedicated to people spinning rare records, niche genres or just straight bangers on vinyl as if it was a warehouse party and I personally love it.

How I Became Obsessed With the Peter Gunn Theme and Why It’s the Best Song Ever

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 04:13:00 -0400

I may be foggy on the exact chronology, but you get the idea: A musical obsession and collectible quest were taking hold. Spawned by Henry Mancini, probably the least likely musical muse for a punky art student in the late ‘70s. A guy who looked more likely to do your taxes than compose a killer riff, but compose a killer riff he did. And it felt like that riff was everywhere.

Learning to Love Frank Zappa

Fri, 19 Sep 2025 04:11:00 -0400

When my sister and I lived together, back when I was first getting to know Matt, we would sit in the backyard and have a few beers and start talking about music. Matt and I did most of the talking, eagerly spouting off trivia and little known tidbits about bands and songs. We quizzed each other good-naturedly. We made up games about music. That love of listening to music, and the love of sharing what we were listening to, is what bonded us together as if we were siblings.

Record Collecting and Sibling Rivalry

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 04:06:00 -0400

My brother and I have been listening to vinyl records since the 1970s, back when it wasn’t collecting, it was just listening. Not because it was cool or had better fidelity. But because that was the form factor for music back then. It was how you experienced music.

Q&A With Artist Kathy Zimmer

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 04:39:00 -0400

Q&A Remix is a frequent column on IHTOV in which people from all walks of life answer a set of questions about their vinyl collection. Today we welcome recording artist Kathy Zimmer

The Importance of Phil Ochs

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 05:56:00 -0400

Things are grim. As I force myself to read and digest yet another news story of Trump gleefully guiding America down the path of fascism, it is hard to feel much other than despair. The only other thing that has brought me much comfort lately has been to break out my Phil Ochs collection, re-read the songbooks, re-learn the songs and focus on finishing the vinyl collection built slowly over the years.

Parts Of Me I Gave Away

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 04:05:00 -0400

I remember feeling like I was drowning in sadness. And the only thing that could ever pull me out of a bad mood was listening to music. I couldn’t find my headphones and I suddenly thought of the record player. I dug it out from where I’d stuffed it. And then I stared at it blankly, because how on earth did you work a record player?

The Music of Cocksparrer: A Perfect Anecdote for Our Nihilistic Times

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 04:02:00 -0400

In the past year, I’ve become more impressed with Cocksparrer’s music. Their band name is slang (Cockney Sparrow) for someone from London’s East End. The band has been making music since the mid-70’s originally. After early major-label failures, they reformed in the 80’s and helped launch a whole new subgenre–street punk. Music by working class people, for working class people.

Finding Catharsis With Tool

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 09:50:00 -0400

Ænima allowed me to do something I’d been trying to do for a year—get my anger out. I’d drive around listening to it, I’d play it in my headphones at home, I’d put it on in the restaurant kitchen and Jim the line cook would say “fuck yeah” while Terence would complain

Songs Never Played on the Radio: A Legacy Between the Grooves

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 04:06:00 -0400

When my aunt Clara died in 2018, she bequeathed me a battered wooden box full of dusty old vinyl records. She had worked at an independent record label, Harmony Records, a briefly run company in Sarasota, Fla., in the 1970s and bankrupted in the early 1980s. Tucked into a stack of albums with wrinkled covers and hand scribbled names was an unmarked, promotional LP with the following fading script scrawled in pen: “For internal review only — Do not distribute.”

Don't Be Denied

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 04:10:00 -0400

When I laid on the grass at Oldchella listening to Neil Young, I forgot. I forgot that at least 45% of Americans were about to elect Donald Trump. I forgot that I had run my own losing campaign into debt. I forgot about the horrible boss I’d had who abused me to the point of leaving an indelible mark. I just listened and discovered something new.

Born to Run at 50

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 03:52:00 -0400

“So, where did my love for Bruce come from? It started after I left New Jersey to go to college and grew more intense when I moved to Texas to be with my wife, Ali. I wanted a piece of home, and his music fed my need for nostalgia.

Never Meant

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 08:17:00 -0400

It’s the Facebook memories that are doing me in this morning. There we are, celebrating my birthday. He bought me a new turntable and a couple of albums and I’m holding up American Football’s LP1 and smiling for all the world like I’m the luckiest person alive. And I am. At that particular point.

Video Game Vinyl

Wed, 20 Aug 2025 04:24:00 -0400

I started collecting vinyl in 2016 when I pre-ordered the Ratchet & Clank (2016) video game soundtrack vinyl from the iam8bit website and I’ve been collecting vinyl since 2016. This means I’ve been collecting vinyl for 9 years so far.

Somewhere I Belong: Music is More Than Music

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 04:51:00 -0400

We often overlook how much community can come from music. Not only from performing music, but being part of the crowd or fanbase. It feels like we’ve stopped taking chances to connect and have just embraced the idea that we’re better off alone. Standing quietly by ourselves, side by side, waiting for the concert to start.

Elvis, My Mother, And Me

Sat, 16 Aug 2025 03:35:00 -0400

“The news of Elvis’s death spread around the neighborhood. It was as if my mother’s sobbing set off some kind of Bat signal, and you could hear wails of anguish coming from housewives all down the block.”

Soundtrack of My Life: Memories Spun on a Vinyl Record

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 04:09:00 -0400

My true reunion with vinyl came nearly two decades later, in my early twenties. Even as technology kept evolving, I saw the vinyl revival. It felt as remarkable as the movies I loved—a moment to pause, live fully in the present. The sound, too, stood out; the contrast with digital was undeniable.

Q&A Remix With Emile Milgrim

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 03:49:00 -0400

Q&A Remix is a frequent column on IHTOV in which people from all walks of life answer a set of questions about their vinyl collection. Today we welcome musician Emile Milgrim

Needle Digs the Scar Deep

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 03:55:00 -0400

The shop was behind an old bakery in Malang. Most people passed it without knowing it was there. No sign. Just a metal shutter with faded stickers of bands I grew up hearing but never saw live. Some called it Toko Rekam Jaya. Others called it “the vault.”

Chosen Time: Life With New Order

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 04:42:00 -0400

Suddenly a guitar slices through this sun-filled haze and is met by a man with a short back and sides haircut wearing sunglasses. A band plays on the beach, interrupting a game of volleyball. The drummer has to avoid being caught mid-game. The bass player’s posture curves into his instrument as if he’s playing his own song. The keyboard player fights a battle not to sink into the golden sand. Shots of a kayak gracefully fill the instrumental gaps.

Word Begets Image

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 03:56:00 -0400

Burroughs talks with the weight of heavy power but swings easily into comical lightness. His voice can be studiously stern yet scatalogically silly, all simultaneously. He’ll narrate a quiet story about a desperate junky on Christmas Eve, then gracefully pivot into a war journalist’s psychographic spasm from a telepathic battlefield.

Ministry's "With Sympathy" as Breakup Album

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 06:20:00 -0400

At some point I became obsessed with Ministry’s With Sympathy, which had come out that May and joined my regular rotation. Oh, how Charlie hated that record. I’d have it on when he came over, and he’d immediately complain about the “noise” I was making him listen to.

Sunny Day Real Estate Never Finished their Second Album and It’s Perfect

Thu, 07 Aug 2025 17:43:00 -0400

It’s possible to take the story around an album’s creation as nothing but window dressing, as fodder for PR efforts. Not every album has a story worth telling, and not every one that does can make the album bigger or deeper. Sometimes the circumstances of an album’s creation are merely coincidental to the thing itself. But sometimes, it’s essential to how it blooms in our understanding.

Heavy is the Head That Crate Digs

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 04:15:00 -0400

Every trip to a record store is intentionless for me. I walk in with absolutely zero goal. I feel about record shopping the way a lot of people talk about weekends. You never know what a trip to the store will bring. It’s a way to embrace the unknown and adventure in new music discovery, always low risk, high reward, a challenge for anyone identified as Anxious.

In Conversation with Comedian Jason Klamm

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 04:20:00 -0400

When I later met Dan, my best friend (of now 35 years), he introduced me to Weird Al’s In 3-D and Cheech and Chong’s Greatest Hit, and I discovered that comedy came in album form. In 1993, we improvised our first tape full of comedy (which I still have) and I’ve rarely worked on something that wasn’t comedic since then.

The Record Store That Raised Me

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 04:57:00 -0400

Rick’s wasn’t just a record store. It was my church, my classroom, my after-school program, and—maybe most importantly—my first real sense of belonging.

I'll Take Two Slices of Vinyl With Extra Cheese: The Pittsburgh Pizza and Vinyl Crawl

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 03:55:00 -0400

The instructions are simple. Pick any vinyl shop to start. Shop, but don’t blow your budget all at once. You have more stops to make! After you make your choice of vinyl, proceed to the first pizza shop on your list for A SLICE. This isn’t about filling up, it’s about sampling. If the pizza place only does whole pies, order a small and split it among your party.

Back to the Mother House

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 04:24:00 -0400

Entire books have been written about Live at the Apollo but in the spirit of the album itself (just over 30 minutes long), I will keep the history brief. Brown was already known and beloved throughout Black America in 1962 but hadn’t quite broken through on the pop charts. He decided to record his midnight show at the Apollo on October 24, 1962 and release it as a live album.

On Faith No More's "Album of the Year" and a Snowy Drive

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 09:09:00 -0400

I’m driving to Pennsylvania from Long Island. It’s February, it’s snowing and I have a deep fear of: driving long distances by myself; driving in the snow; getting lost. This is before smartphones. I have a printout from Mapquest that I have to follow, and I try to memorize the instructions so I don’t have to keep looking at the map while I am white knuckling this drive.

Q&A Remix With Alexei Shishkin

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 04:17:00 -0400

Q&A Remix is a frequent column on IHTOV in which people from all walks of life answer a set of questions about their vinyl collection. Today we welcome musician Alexei Shishkin

Coldplay's "The Scientist" and Break Up Grief

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 05:35:00 -0400

Enter Coldplay. I distinctly remember the day I listened. It was February, one month after he left. I was still new to feeling alone, to feeling both rage and sorrow. I was stumbling in the dark, unable to find a light switch. I needed to highlight my emotions, to let them shine, to actually feel my feelings. It was the only way through. I don’t know why I picked Coldplay.

My First Records

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 20:03:00 -0400

I was born in spring 1961, in Brooklyn NY. My parents, in their early 30s, had a small assortment of records, infrequently added-to. There were some cast albums, a record of James Bond movie themes, , and some classical and jazz albums which I found ignorable when dad played them. Mom and Dad were born just a little too early for rock’n’roll generally, but there were two albums in our house that I have always seen as my primal touchstones.

My Mother-in-Law’s Records

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 04:24:00 -0400

My current vinyl collection comprises 52 albums that belonged to my late mother-in-law and most of it sucks. “Sucks” is too harsh. It includes a smattering of classical and opera, a few out-and-out duds (Andy Williams), and quite a bit of Broadway, a genre I love, although not as indiscriminately as my mother-in-law. (L’il Abner? WTF, Dorothy?) I don’t own a turntable, but in late 2020 my ex-husband decided these records should reside with me and so they reside with me. I loved my mother-in-law very much. I loved her so much I let her die without knowing that her son had left me.

Burst & Decay and Grace with The Wonder Years

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 03:34:00 -0400

Generally speaking, those questions assume a static interaction: going back to something you know, and considering only that thing in a vacuum. That is not what The Wonder Years do, though, and it never really has been.

Falling Through the Stars: Mike Doughty's "Haughty Melodic" and a Lost Friendship

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 03:54:00 -0400

In 2005. I joined an online forum called Fark dot com, whose logo was a squirrel with giant balls. I treated the site with all the seriousness it deserved, which is to say, none.

A Beautiful Now: The free record that started my vinyl collection

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 03:53:00 -0400

Daniela Amavia’s 2015 film A Beautiful Now is the reason I own a record player. I haven’t seen the movie and don’t know anything about its plot, but in 2017 I acquired its soundtrack album, produced by cinematic synth-pop auteur and Italians Do It Better label figurehead Johnny Jewel, for free.

30 Years of "Grace" Among Us

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 04:17:00 +0000

Needle dropping on the gold vinyl. Slow spinning, soft humming. A moment of silence. Then, out of those golden lines, a golden voice: Jeff Buckley, for the first time, sang through the speakers in my office, bouncing off the walls in waves, in textures. That was Grace, for the first time on vinyl.

Love at the Abbey Pub: Okkervil River's Black Sheep Boy

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 05:48:00 +0000

The music itself deserves attention on it’s own, but one literally cannot listen to Okkervil River without diving into the lyrics. In this album, alone, Will has cobbled together some of the best word play and poetry that even the most well read and musically exposed among us are sure to be stopped in their tracks by.

Mystery Prize Inside (My Favorite Inserts)

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 04:48:00 +0000

Cracker Jacks, cereal boxes in the 90’s, Kinder Eggs. What makes these things appealing, aside from a diabetic coma-inducing levels of sugar, is that it comes with a prize inside. A cheap harmonica, a branded figurine, X-ray specs, you name it, it could be inside what was already a treat. Just a little something extra. A prize for winning at enjoying your life (and mostly likely losing your health but who needs it). Records are the same way.

...Is a Punk Rocker

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 11:26:00 +0000

“Blitzkrieg Bop” hit me over the head. It was not subtle like Fleetwood Mac, nor did it have the intricacies of Yes. In fact, it was quite the opposite. It was noisy. It was brash. It was in your face. And I loved it. I wanted to hear it again and again.

Please Let Me Hold The Brave Little Abacus in My Arms

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 03:52:00 +0000

The Brave Little Abacus’ second full length album, “Just Got Back From the Discomfort - we’re alright,” commonly known as “Just Got Back” or “JGB,” turned 15 years old in May. It’s also one of the most influential albums of the 21st century when informing the tastes of young emo musicians.

Leo Sayer and the Saviors of Rock and Roll

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 04:04:00 +0000

We listen to prog rock and punk rock and never pop rock or disco or, god forbid, Journey. We think guitar solos are passé but drum solos rock the house. We think Peter Gabriel is a genius and bands like Kansas need to be silenced. We secretly listen to Van Halen but no one tells the other until years later, when we laugh about David Lee Roth from the safe distance of many years.

20 Years of Feeling the Illinoise: Predatory Wasps, Queer Longing, and Spiritual Wonder

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 04:26:00 +0000

I’ve never asked Ben if he read Pitchfork back then, but it seems obvious in retrospect. His music taste was cool and unlike anything any of my friends were listening to. David offered to load up my iPod with some new music he had learned about from his brother (all totally legally acquired), and it’s no hyperbole to say that it changed my life.

If the Sun Refused to Shine

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 09:06:00 +0000

As a lifelong Zeppelin collector myself I knew the kinds of records Kerri was looking for, and it wasn’t unusual for me to grab something at the last minute from my private collection to take to the Record Fair specifically for her to appraise. Our mutual affinity for Led Zep and vinyl meant that we had plenty to talk about and I always looked forward to catching up with her every few months.

Peter Frampton and the Reason My Mom and I Stopped Discussing Music

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 04:21:00 +0000

If you know and love the album, you know the part I’m talking about. Frampton was coming out of the slow section of “Do You Feel Like We Do” and that long, wonderful talkbox-fueled guitar solo. Bob Mayo was laying down some cool quiet keys, Stanley Sheldon’s bass was thumping sustained whole notes and John Siomos was backing it all with a nice tappy-tap on the high-hat, a pattern I have played on my own drum kit many times since

Have You Never Been Mellow: Olivia Newton-John and Me

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 04:11:00 +0000

I felt like a fraud because hidden under my bed were albums by The Carpenters and Paul Simon and Elton John. I secretly loved that kind of music in the same all-encompassing way that I loved listening to Black Sabbath.

Infinity Song:The New Generation of Soft Rock

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 04:28:00 +0000

Pure Talent, Raw Passion and Self Discovery are not just words used to describe Infinity Song’s latest album “Metamorphosis”, but are emotions and actions the album implores you to explore, this body of work that channels the raw emotions of growing and figuring out who you’re meant to be.

Two Gifts And A Life

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 04:59:00 +0000

During Junior year, I befriended the late-night jazz DJ on the local public radio station. Steve started his show at 11 o’clock and continued into the wee hours. A lonely night owl, I began calling with requests and comments, and we started a conversation that has continued to this day.

Introducing: The IHTOV Listening Club for Patreon Members

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 07:07:00 +0000

Join us at the Patreon as we embark on a new treat for members. We’re going to listen collectively to an album (on our own) and come back to the Patreon to discuss it. Here’s how it works:

MIchael, Muppets, and Memories

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 06:13:00 +0000

The boys found the record player in my mother’s basement in the toy room turned guest bedroom next to the stuffed animals. When I was a child in the 1980s she had one of those tall silver stereo cabinets with a glass door over it. It was where I first heard John Denver, Michael Jackson, Earth Wind & Fire, Sesame Street, The Muppets, and “Purple Rain” by Prince.

Remembering Brian Wilson

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 04:20:00 +0000

Over the next few years, I will snap up all the records I can find that make me feel like I do when I’m listening to Pet Sounds or All Summer Long. Of course, these other records can only fall short. It’s not their fault. They’re up against Brian Wilson. But I keep snapping them up, regardless.

Pitching Your Vinyl Story to IHTOV

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 15:58:00 +0000

The possibilities are endless, really. No pitch is too weird or offbeat for me. I want variety on the site, not the same old records being talked over and over.

Songs of the Summer

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 03:57:00 +0000

The only redeeming thing about summer is music. Some songs just sound different when you’re driving with the windows down on Ocean Parkway.

All That We Could Do With This E•MO•TION

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 09:28:00 +0000

I wish I could begin an essay with a saxophone solo, wistful and bold, the way Carly Rae Jepsen begins “Run Away With Me,” the first track on her 2015 album EMOTION.

What Vinyl Taught Me About My Dad

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 04:23:00 +0000

Now, when I say this collection was eclectic, I mean there was everything from The Beatles, Santana, Anne Murry, Miriam Makeba, to the World of Strauss, and Bollywood and more. I flipped through every box, each record, unaware of just how passionate about music my dad truly was.

Jukebox Harrow

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 04:17:00 +0000

I need as many song titles as I can get from the old jukebox at Fox and Hounds from the early 90s. I have some names, but I need more. All contributions are welcome. You will receive nothing in return but thanks from me and a grateful nation.

A Trip to The Really Strange Record Club

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 04:03:00 +0000

There aren’t a lot of places in London where you can go for a pint and expect to hear a 1950s record called ‘My Pussy Belongs to Daddy’, but Dreamhouse Records is one of them– at least it is when the Really Strange Record Club is in session

Q&A Remix: Tom Blake

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 04:01:00 +0000

Q&A Remix is a frequent column on IHTOV in which people from all walks of life answer a set of questions about their vinyl collection. Today we welcome author, poet, and music journalist Tom Blake

The Summer of Speaking in Tongues

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 03:43:00 +0000

What I remember most is the joy, the exhilaration. I knew we were listening to something special, an instant classic. And I knew that even though 1983 was shaping up to be an incredible year for music, this would soundtrack the summer.

Box Full of Letters

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 04:38:00 +0000

We met in a used record store. I was a customer; she was the clerk.

At the time I was a freelancer between paychecks, so I was making the walk of shame up to the counter with an armload of records to sell for pocket money.

I’d haunted this shop for ages and knew all the guys who worked there. And it was very much a guy place. So I was surprised—embarrassed, really—to be facing someone younger, hipper, certainly cuter than my buddies. Don’t worry, I didn’t part with any real gems, mostly stuff I knew I could either live without or reacquire if needed. This being the early ‘90s, used records weren’t nearly as sought-after as they are today. Great for collecting; not so great for selling.

Pet Sounds and Chasing Down a Dream

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 04:25:00 +0000

On the day of the show, I made my way to Uncasville, CT; walked over to the place to get my ticket and then to the arena. A young woman was there waiting for me. “This way.” Holy crap this is it. I followed her, walking past Al Jardine and Blondie Chaplin to a large room where Brian is sitting in an armchair.

On Good Looks, Old Guys, and Fandom

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 04:46:00 +0000

There aren’t exact metrics for this sort of thing, but by any you might name—hours spent listening to, shows attended, friends and strangers annoyed with unsolicited recommendations—the Austin, Texas indie outfit Good Looks is my favorite band

Q&A Remix: Artist Clara Kay

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 04:43:00 +0000

Q&A Remix is a frequent column on IHTOV in which people from all walks of life answer a set of questions about their vinyl collection. Today we welcome artist Clara Kay

Some Dads: How the Stones Made Me Appreciate My Dad

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 08:01:00 +0000

It’s no coincidence that Some Girls is my favorite Stones album. All of my from my childhood and youth are associated with music in one form or another, and I closely associate that album with my dad. My heart warms every time I hear “Far Away Eyes,” thinking of him belting it out, so unabashed, so happy.

Here and gone so fast: ‘Pet Sounds’ and my friend Tom

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 04:24:00 +0000

Brian Wilson is dead. As many of us know, he leaves behind plenty of very well-known songs, a bunch of peculiar ones, and at least one essential, beloved LP: Pet Sounds.

On “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter” and Loving the Bloat

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 04:21:00 +0000

When I first heard Joni Mitchell’s polarizing and underdiscussed 1977 double LP, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, I didn’t much care for it. I appreciated its sprawling nature and orchestral flourishes, but the songs themselves felt distant and obscure

In Conversation With Music Journalist Martin Douglas - Part Two

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 04:14:00 +0000

Part Two of a lenghty, fascinating conversation

The Day After Record Store Day: A Profile of a Record Store Owner

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 02:34:00 +0000

Downtown Summit, New Jersey is a little less musical these days. Scotti’s Records, one of the longest-tenured businesses on Springfield Ave, has closed after 68 years of business.

Alt-Country First: A Conversation with Labrador’s Pat King about his latest and greatest LP, "My Version of Desire"

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 04:16:00 +0000

Genre definitions are a child’s game, but it’s worth asking just what qualifies as “alt-country” these days anyway. Many of music’s middle-class indie rock elite have made some sort of crossover album, often obliging their previously basement fanbases to lap steel draped in arena reverb.

The Joy in Discovery

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 04:32:00 +0000

The cover was a young man with an acoustic guitar with the single word “Herman” in large colorful lettering with the album title, I’ve Made Up My Mind, underneath.

Enjoying Incubus

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 08:45:00 +0000

The song, “A Certain Shade of Green,” has me hooked in the first seconds. I sit there with my jaw hanging open as the tune progresses. “What is this?” I ask. This is my introduction to Incubus. It is the start of a love affair.

The Cut-Out Bin

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 04:30:00 +0000

They all had a notch sliced near the corner of the record jacket. This is why the remainder section was nicknamed The Cut Out Bin.

Good News For People Who Love Modest Mouse

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 02:58:00 +0000

I’m here to talk about Modest Mouse. And I am here to defend Good News For People Who Love Bad News, their most popular album. It’s not my favorite Modest Mouse album—that title belongs to The Lonesome Crowded West—but it is a very, very good album.

Treasures Inscribed on Vinyl

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 04:09:00 +0000

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.

What Cataloging Vinyl Records in a Museum Taught me About Music

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 04:40:00 +0000

Whether I’m holding Boston’s self-titled debut album, a new pressing of a Nick Drake record, or pre-ordering a more recent rock band’s colorful record, holding a vinyl record is like holding a renewed past in that moment.

45s of my Youth: Teen Tragedy

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 04:16:00 +0000

My younger sister and my cousins loved this song as much as I did. So we did what any tween kids would do at the time. We made up a sort of skit to go with it. We mouthed the lyrics and did coordinated gestures.

Record Stores on the Road

Fri, 30 May 2025 04:10:00 +0000

Being on the road with Perennial means I’m constantly visiting record stores. Every new city we play, every town we bring the sound to… we’re always finding a record shop on the way or near the venue to crate dig for hours. It’s routine at this point.

Q&A Remix With Rob Skipworth

Fri, 30 May 2025 04:08:00 +0000

I got a Louis Armstrong box set on Amazon that had been incorrectly priced at $12. Found a Third Man Vault release at a Goodwill and got a $100 Loretta Lynn set for 75 cents.

Borrowed Tune

Wed, 28 May 2025 04:02:00 +0000

Today I call Ingrid while I walk. We’ve been friends since high school and though life has taken us to different places, we’ve remained close. She lives in Nashville now, working for Warner Music full-time, editing audio for video games part-time, and singing in between.

In Conversation With Music Journalist Martin Douglas

Mon, 26 May 2025 05:31:00 +0000

I like being able to collect something. I like the physical medium. The thing I like most about vinyl is that it’s a…I don’t want to say a living, breathing thing, but it is a thing that you can hold in your hands, and I’m really into the physical practice of picking a record off of the shelf and putting it on the turntable and listening to it through this huge pair of speakers that I have

The Simpsons Sing the Blues; the Worm Ourobouros Devours Its Own Tail

Mon, 26 May 2025 04:36:00 +0000

I bought “The Simpsons Sing The Blues” with my own allowance, $5 a week, so it took me a month to buy, and I chose to buy it on cassette.

This is Big Audio Dynamite

Fri, 23 May 2025 04:32:00 +0000

I cannot stand to leave a copy of Big Audio Dynamite’s groundbreaking yet sadly underappreciated debut This Is Big Audio Dynamite (1985) in a bin of used records. It would feel like leaving a baby kitten unattended.

Q&A With Pat King of Labrador

Fri, 23 May 2025 04:30:00 +0000

I had been to the old Amoeba in Hollywood, but I wasn’t prepared for how vast their selection was. I froze up a bit, I’ll be honest.

406: A House Haunted With Music

Thu, 22 May 2025 03:37:00 +0000

I left my records in their milk crates and embraced the music he brought to me. We listened to Fu Manchu, New Bomb Turks, Turbonegro, and the Angry Samoans. The music was loud and fast and at times bombastic. It fit his personality, matched the very essence of his being. I all but stopped listening to Brand New and Taking Back Sunday; I had taken on his likes, his bands, his ways. I no longer knew how to be me.

A Ghost Among the Ruins: Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii

Wed, 21 May 2025 04:22:00 +0000

Memory and music walk hand-and-hand. Don’t believe me? Just ask the next ten people you run into if there is a song or album that reminds them of a particular time and/or place in their lives. I bet you’ll get ten different answers and ten unique stories

No Time For Hate, Dr. Jones

Tue, 20 May 2025 04:30:00 +0000

Everyone would know exactly what I thought of Modern Family. They would find out just how I felt about fancy martinis that weren’t really martinis. The Toronto Maple Leafs, Meat Loaf (the guy not the food), and DJ Madison on Lithium all fell under my wrath

Blank Slates and The White Stripes

Mon, 19 May 2025 06:00:00 +0000

I was a teenager when Napster came out. We had Erol’s Internet, a dial-up provider run by the local video store chain, and if that sounds weird now, please know that it sounded just as weird in 1999. With our 28.8 kbps modem, it was possible to download a whole song, but it might take a day or two

Comfort Albums and Mashed Potatoes

Sun, 18 May 2025 04:47:00 +0000

I have my happy place albums, but they’re not the same as comfort albums—the records I would be devastated to lose, that represent to me what the bowl represented to my mother: a connection to the past and present, a tangible object of perceived permanence.

On Steve Albini: Words About Fucking Up

Fri, 16 May 2025 04:36:00 +0000

My pilgrimage to Electrical Audio, the studio that Steve Albini built and owned for 26 years, was a tribute to the man and his influence on my adult life. Knowing Albini had engineered a record made it more likely that I’d enjoy listening to it. His ubiquity on podcasts made great company on long drives. I didn’t idolize the man, but I admired him as much as I admired anybody.

Q&A Remix With Jimmy Wilkens

Fri, 16 May 2025 04:36:00 +0000

I’m very fortunate to know so many amazing & talented people who make music and whenever I’m given the opportunity to talk about them, I will. I don’t think Barely Civil gets talked about nearly enough, for example. I would share any of their records with new friends.

Preserving History By Mistake

Wed, 14 May 2025 04:00:00 +0000

This wasn’t the band Caravan. Instead, this was an even more obscure release by the ‘60s psych rock band Salvation — worth over a hundred dollars in good condition

S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y NIGHT: a tale of family treachery and the Bay City Rollers

Tue, 13 May 2025 04:21:00 +0000

I thought they were cute; my friends thought they were funny-looking. I thought they were personable and fun, my older cousins called them freaks. I think I started listening to “Saturday Night” as a novelty, but it grew into such a personal anthem that I asked my mother to buy me the album.

The Art of Collecting MAYHEM: A Gaga Era Worth Chasing

Mon, 12 May 2025 04:06:00 +0000

I never thought I’d be the person who owned multiple copies of the same album- but MAYHEM isn’t just any album. It’s Lady Gaga’s most ambitious album yet. This is the story of how I ended up with eleven vinyl variants- and why I’d do it all again.

Q&A Remix With Sara Mae (The Noisy)

Mon, 12 May 2025 04:02:00 +0000

My neighbor that I had a crush on gave me Led Zeppelin IV and I used to get home from angsty bike rides through the neighborhood and listen to it laying on my bedroom floor. Love that for 15-year-old me.

Notes From My Mother on the Music of her Life

Sat, 10 May 2025 06:48:00 +0000

When I was 15 things started to change. There was this guy named Elvis making the scene. At that time we moved from Brooklyn to West Islip (Long Island), and along with the change of address came the change in music.

The Music My Mother Gave Me

Fri, 09 May 2025 09:15:00 +0000

The first record I remember my mom playing for me instead of just putting something on passively was the original cast recording of Hair. She loved her show tunes; I had by age seven already memorized the songs she played from The Music Man, South Pacific, West Side Story, and The Sound of Music.

The Church of Purple Rain

Fri, 09 May 2025 09:14:00 +0000

This is what music does, when it’s at its most holy: it doesn’t just score your memories, it reassembles them. It carves out hidden hallways between who you were and who you’ve become. And some days, if the light hits right and the needle lands just so, you get to slip through one of those corridors, barefoot, breath held, heart open.

The Church of Purple Rain

Fri, 09 May 2025 04:03:00 +0000

The Propagandhi-Recess Records Odds and Ends

Wed, 07 May 2025 04:29:00 +0000

Making a podcast about one band is certainly a strange hobby but it has been simultaneously quite fulfilling because through Propagandhi, I have learned about the police in Saskatchewan dropping off people in the frozen wilderness to die, land rights standoffs, ayahuasca experiences, the ins and outs of the animal industrial complex, and countless other research-worthy nuggets hidden within the lyrics.

Collecting Across Generations - A Talk With My Daughter, Natalie

Tue, 06 May 2025 05:54:00 +0000

Well, the memory that just popped up is my brother and I calling the station to request songs when we were, like, three and six and I remember wanting to hear a song and the guys at the radio station thinking it was so cool that kids were calling in requesting Korn.

Separation Sunday at 20

Mon, 05 May 2025 03:58:00 +0000

It’s very difficult for me to dislodge The Hold Steady or Separation Sunday from that time in my life; it’s one of those albums that’s a portal from who you were to who you became in the way that you can still do when you’re still young enough to have to worry if you knew anyone who might be nice enough to buy you beer.

Stay Gold

Mon, 05 May 2025 03:58:00 +0000

There was only one thing that was saving the summer from being a bust: my portable eight-track player. It was a bulky, awkwardly built piece of machinery, and anything played on it sounded like it was coming out of a small AM transistor radio.

Elsewhere: AOL, Catfishing, and Sarah McLachlan's Fumbling Towards Ecstasy

Fri, 02 May 2025 04:16:00 +0000

I’ve been listening to a lot of heavy metal. Pantera, Slayer, things of that nature. I have this vague anger hanging onto me that I can’t shake — and honestly, I don’t know if I want to shake it. Everything else inside me feels hollow, carved out, a void now filled by an adrenaline rush that keeps me from sinking into myself

NIN's "With Teeth" at 20

Fri, 02 May 2025 04:05:00 +0000

At the time Nine Inch Nails was one of those bands I had heard of, but never listened to, only knowing their iconic 3 letter logo. So I figured now was as good a time as any to hear what this band was all about. I played the song, and playing along to the simple, but heavy riffs Trent Reznor laid down awakened something in me

Which Side Am I On? Billy Bragg, unions, progressivism, music, and their effect on me

Thu, 01 May 2025 04:16:00 +0000

A young-ish Billy became politically aware and active in the late 70s. He was only a bit older than I was when I first heard that scratchy cassette. Like many young people of his age in England, it involved The Clash.

My Fraught Romance: the pains and purity of listening to vinyl records

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 03:50:00 +0000

So, why on earth do I still feel compelled to buy vinyl records? I still do, pretty frequently. (My most recent purchases at the time of writing in Autumn 2024 were the beguiling Spell Blanket collected demos by Broadcast, and Aluminium’s superb Fully Beat). To answer that question, it feels like I need to look through my relatively small yet beloved assortment, variously scattered throughout the house.

Q&A Remix With Chad of Perennial

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 20:10:00 +0000

Have you ever bought a record just for the artwork?

Just recently we were record shopping and the cover for a compilation called Wig Out! Freak Out!: Freakbeat & Mod Psychedelia caught Chelsey’s eye. That mid-60s mod/garage rock sound is our favorite, but neither of us had any idea about this particular comp until we saw the very, very groovy cover design.

What is your most memorable vinyl buying/receiving experience?

Talking With Daniel Kohn

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 04:03:00 +0000

Daniel Kohn is the co-author of the forthcoming book “Tearing Down the Orange Curtain: How Punk Rock Brought Orange County to the World”

On Grief, Neil Young's Harvest, and Folk Music

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 04:00:00 +0000

Grief can take many shapes. Thanks to therapy and pharmacological intervention, I’m finally figuring out the geometry of mine. I find myself wanting, more than anything, to discuss the things she left me – like her record collection, specifically her copy of Neil Young’s Harvest.

The Horror and the Clash

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 04:26:00 +0000

I sat facing the house, with my back toward the canal. I didn’t want to think about what went on inside there, so I pressed play on the cassette and let the sounds of the Clash wash over me. I didn’t play it too loud; the neighbors probably called the cops every night on teenage revelers. I also didn’t want to hear the peals of laughter coming from the house.

Jazz as a Working Metaphor for Life

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 04:22:00 +0000

He left behind all the usual things: photobooks with the original negatives, clothing, a staggering wealth of Scotty Cameron putters. And for me, a large box of vinyl in different stages of wear and tear. There was no Sinatra or Tony Bennett. No Dean Martin or Bobby Darin. As I fingered through those albums, I felt uniquely rich. Loss was as significant as it was final, and there I was on the floor meeting my grandfather through this corpus of jazz again.

On Vinyl Regret

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 05:01:00 +0000

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.

There's a New Wave Coming

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 07:36:00 +0000

It’s been said the music you listen to in high school is the music that stays your favorite forever, but I’m here as proof that this is not necessarily true. I graduated high school in 1980 and spent the next three years cultivating an entirely new personality based around the music I was listening to.

Down By The River: My Neil Young Experience

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 04:19:00 +0000

At that moment, the door for the tour bus opened and two large dogs came out on leashes. I was expecting Neil was coming out with his dogs but it was Daryl Freaking Hannah! My brain was beginning to melt as I couldn’t believe what was happening.

Announcing the IHTOV Patreon

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 03:50:00 +0000

As of this morning, I Have That on Vinyl now has a Patreon.

For a mere $5 a month, you can join in and get exclusive content like “best of” lists and side stories, you can participate in polls, make reader suggestions, leave comments and discuss music with other users, and get merch like stickers and buttons.

Basically, I am trying to establish an IHTOV community, and Patreon is the perfect place in which to do that. I’d love for you to join and get those weekly (or more) extra posts, and talk to me about what you want from the site. The polls will be fun, and that’s what I’m trying to foster here - a little fun in a bleak world. Please share this news with other fans of the site or your friend or relatives or mailman who might be interested!

Five Dice, All Threes

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 03:48:00 +0000

I tend to ignore Bright Eyes’ singles when they’re released because they always make more sense as a part of a whole album. It would be like reading the 3rd chapter of a book I had planned to buy the day it came out. Without the context of the album it wouldn’t make much sense. It’s not that they make concept albums but they make albums that fit together like puzzle pieces.

Into the Woods With Sleater-Kinney

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 04:37:00 +0000

This was the band’s seventh album, and not only had they not become tired at this point, but I think this is the best they ever sounded. It had swagger. The opening note itself tells you everything you need to know about what’s coming.

The Day I Became a Music Aficionado

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 04:33:00 +0000

Wearing my favourite green corduroy trousers, Clarks shoes and anorak, I hovered outside nervously, watching as people in fashionable togs disappeared into the dimly lit store. In the window was a handwritten list of that week’s top twenty singles and there at the very top, the number one record that week, was the record I intended to buy

Songs For Earth Day

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 07:41:00 +0000

You care about the environment. You recycle your plastics and cans. You stopped using Aqua-Net many years ago, after Skid Row broke up for the first time. On the measuring line of environmentalists, you fall somewhere between the girl who uses a canvas bag for food shopping to keep her conscience in good spirits and the guy who stands on the street corner wearing a sandwich board proclaiming climate change is the devil’s work.

In Defense of my Shitty Records

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 04:30:00 +0000

But I treasure each of these recordings all the same, as I did the CD collection that accompanied me through the wasteland of Western suburbia, a scarcity mindset triggered into generosity and attention. A strange thing happens when I drop the needle: I pay attention in a different way than when I open up my streaming app of choice. Suddenly I am free from limitless choice, to say nothing of algorithmic curation; this is no longer an experience to be “optimized.”

In the Year 2525

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 05:26:00 +0000

In the corner of the room was a little turntable, something they must have put in the room as an afterthought because there was only one record: a single by Zager & Evans, called “In the Year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus).” I’d heard the song before but never paid much attention to it,as it wasn’t my speed musically (I was probably still into Disney songs at the time), and 2525 seemed such a ridiculous thing to sing about.

Confessions of a Former Led Zeppelin Vinyl Bootleg Addict

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 05:25:00 +0000

Led Zeppelin was the first band that I really connected with. Thanks to “Hard Rock” FM radio of the late 1970s, I was provided with a steady dose of Led Zeppelin and all the other staples of the era. This was also the time that I started performing odd jobs so that I could afford to finally buy their albums. Once I had their full discography, the album I listened to most was the live album The Song Remains the Same. As much as I enjoyed their studio albums, to me, the live versions contained much more energy and excitement, even if they were a little rough around the edges.

Name Your Joy

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 04:11:00 +0000

There are a few times in my life when I’ve gone from zero to groupie in a matter of minutes. Those moments when I’ve heard a song or seen a live performance and forged an instant connection to a band that ended up going beyond mere appreciation of the music.

On a High Note

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 03:31:00 +0000

I have decided to celebrate 4/20, which is happening this weekend (on Easter), by telling you about the songs I listen to when I’m high. These are not songs about being high—you can find those lists at the usual places this weekend—but songs that go along with being high or are really interesting to listen to while stoned.

On Karlheinz Stockhausen's Music

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 03:22:00 +0000

I heard a low-quality rip of Gesang der Jünglinge by Karlheinz Stockhausen while deep in a Youtube rabbit hole as a teenager. It blew my mind. His music didn’t sound like anything I had ever heard before, having been raised on a steady listening diet of what we now call “mom rock” and “dad rock.” Music that wasn’t based on guitars was new and exciting to me at the time, but this seemed to exist in a galaxy of its own.

King Jeremy the Wicked: How “Jeremy” Helped Jeremy to Love Being Jeremy

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 05:33:00 +0000

And then, when I was in middle school, my parents introduced me to Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy,” a badass rock song that offered a small sliver of feeling witnessed. A badass rock song that followed another young boy named Jeremy, a young, insecure boy who made art and was bullied relentlessly

Just What I Needed - Discovering the Cars

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 04:14:00 +0000

I became a Cars evangelist. I recorded the song off the radio and made everyone listen to it. I didn’t care that almost all of them had heard it. I wanted to play “Just What I Needed” all the time.

Light My Fire - My Night With Rock Royalty

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 04:10:00 +0000

When I was twelve, my dad inadvertently introduced me to my first musical obsession. His intention was to send me upriver with Captain Willard on a mission to take out the deranged Colonel Kurtz. Instead, what I found was the haunting psychedelic sounds of the Doors. The film was, of course, Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece “Apocalypse Now,” and the song in the intro was “The End.” A band whose singer had passed some twenty years before I had even heard a single note from them; yet a band that would play a role in arguably one of the greatest experiences in my career as a personal chef.

Sebadoh and My First Vinyl Purchase

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 04:19:00 +0000

One specific band that I had fallen in love with was Sebadoh, Lou Barlow’s post-Dinosaur Jr (at the time) band. I had a lot of feelings as a teen and so did Lou, and Sebadoh’s sound on 1994’s Bakesale was just the right amount of familiar and different for a kid who was exploring their own taste in music after the death of Kurt Cobain.

Is This All There Is - On Foxing's "Foxing"

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 05:17:00 +0000

The screaming of Constant fatigue constant fatigue constant fatigue on “Hell 99” plays in my head over and over. I scream along with it when it’s playing because holy shit, I am fatigued. The world fatigues me. Life fatigues me. “Hell 99” is not the best song on the album (that honor belongs to “Gratitude”), but it is the rawest song, and I live for music that feels raw and vulnerable. Here, Foxing is at their most vulnerable but also at their most powerful.

Captain Beyond and the Hunt for Obscure 70s Vinyl

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 05:15:00 +0000

Though I have no proof of this, I would bet dollars to doughnuts that the need to find things is hardwired into our DNA. Seriously, just think about the archetypal quests that proliferate from the minds of writers across the globe and across time. From the Arthurian quest for the Holy Grail, to Indiana Jones and the…well, again Holy Grail, you get what I mean. There just seems to be a need to find what has been lost. My son Enzo and I are hunters of rare vinyl.

Talking With Matt Carter About Frank Zappa

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 05:38:00 +0000

Today we are talking to Matt Carter of Rhode Island about his Zappa fandom. I referred to him as “my resident Zappa expert” on social media, and we decided to let people ask him questions about Zappa.

Hunting For Space Invaders

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 04:00:00 +0000

One of the tracks on the CD was a song called “Spacing Out” by a band called The Invaders. Upon my first listen, I was instantly hooked. There were elements of spaced-out psych-rock, latin jazz, funk, and other worldly sounds that totally rocked my world. A gale force blast of mighty horns and tight snares gave it a sharp, nasty groove like it was coming straight from the underground of a ‘70s gangster flick. There were bits of R&B, soul, lounge, and the playful experimentations of Stereolab all rolled up into one song. Like the swing of Esquivel with the driving force Parliament Funkadelic. It opened my ears to something I had never heard before and sparked my curiosity.

How Are Sheryl Crow’s Albums Not On Vinyl?

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 04:13:00 +0000

It’s a question that should boggle the mind of any music fan: how are Sheryl Crow’s pivotal albums of the 1990s and early 2000s not yet available on vinyl? In an era when the format has been resurrected as a celebration of artistry, the absence of Sheryl’s catalog — albums that belong alongside the best of their time — stands out as baffling and unjust.

Someone Saved My Life Tonight

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 04:12:00 +0000

I had harbored a secret love for Elton since 1973, when “Daniel” entered my heart and “Crocodile Rock” got stuck in my brain. I bought Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player with my allowance, thinking it was the epitome of anything Elton John could ever accomplish musically.Then Goodbye Yellow Brick Road came out later that year, and I was blown away. I was eleven, too young to really get the nuances of the album but old enough to know it was brilliant.

Talking With Pup's Steve Sladkowski

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 19:22:00 +0000

So I’m pretty lucky that a lot of stuff in my collection is either stuff my dad bought new, you know, in the 60s and 70s, or stuff that I found…before that wave of vinyl collecting in the 2010s, when it really started to ramp up again. And yeah, now it’s basically one of my favorite things to do to waste time on tour.

Talking With Chris Walla

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 04:54:00 +0000

“It’s like, I don’t want to listen to Death Cab For Cutie. Please stop recommending it to me. I don’t want to listen to the Postal Service. Please stop recommending it to me. And you know, I love all of that music. I loved working on those records and I love those guys, you know, they’re great. But when it was that raw and that new, it was just like, can’t do it.”

The Intimate Relationship of a Demo Track

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 04:52:00 +0000

“Demo releases give an extra sense of intimacy between the artist and the listener. Similarly to waking up next to someone, a demo track provides a rawness that technical preparedness could not emulate and a new level to the relationship established.”

Jackson Browne and Staying Alive

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 04:45:00 +0000

I listened to enough Jackson Browne in high school to know what I was getting into by opening 1993’s I’m Alive. I was a little hesitant because how good could it be if I never heard of it? But it’s not as if I had exactly been keeping track of Browne. So that winter night in 1996—six weeks after my marriage ended—I took a chance and put on I’m Alive and settled in for the long haul. I never get past the first song.

The Debate of the Century: That Weird French 45 in my Record Collection

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 04:36:00 +0000

“The 45 in question was called “Le Debat Du Siecle” (The Debate of the Century), an eleven-minute recording by two French comedians, Thierry Le Luron and Pierre Douglas, who were known for doing political comedy and developed an act where they impersonated two famous current politicians in a debate scenario.

Samurai Champloo’s Departure and its Arrival

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 04:07:00 +0000

“My father had originally set the sound system up for me in my mother’s old apartment, as I sat at the piano and played a few tunes for him, that day one of the few times I learned about his taste in classical music, his strong preference for the Satie and the Chopin over the Schumann and Pachelbel, each reveal its own surprise. As much as I enjoy a prelude, Departure’s instrumental hip-hop is what I find myself reaching for when there are silences to fill, or when we have company over.”

Sad Songs to Spiral To

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 05:08:00 +0000

I go through my album collection and pick out the saddest songs, the ones with despondent lyrics and morose melodies. I look for breakup songs but also songs that deal with a vague sadness. The sadness does not have to be named; it just has to permeate my soul. I prefer to listen to them on my turntable, rather than streaming them on my computer because the sound fills the living room, laying waste to the emptiness that threatens to envelop me.

The Go-Go Days Are Gone-Gone

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 05:06:00 +0000

When The Go-Go’s first album was released, I spent untold hours listening to it spin, singing along to every lyric from the bubble-gum pink inner sleeve, staring at the back of the speckled cover transfixed, where all five members appear in individual black-and-white photos taking bubble baths, looking both sexy and innocent—the epitome of a young girl’s fantasy self. I not only loved their music; I wanted to be The Go-Go’s, specifically Charlotte Caffey, the seemingly quiet background character who, on the cover, reads a book called Harlot and eats chocolate in her overflowing bubble bath.

Six Years of PUP's "Morbid Stuff"

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 04:31:00 +0000

“The music was relentless. I felt it in my bones. All that stagnation came to the surface. All that Midwest emo I’d been drowning in suddenly seemed too sad for me. I needed a fight. I needed anarchy. I needed PUP.”

Four Days: Searching For This Desert Life

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 04:29:00 +0000

“I’d spent most of my life to that point wondering if any band will ever really speak to me. I’ve heard rumors before of music changing people’s lives, of finding commiserate truths and profundities in song lyrics, but I always figured that was hyperbole at its finest. But in the dark hours in my living room, lost and alone, I see a shy, introspective man giving voice to the sad longings within my heart, lost, broken, confused, and alone. And yet, round here, we always stand up straight.”

Q&A Remix with Sam and Jaden of Steel Wool

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 04:29:00 +0000

“I remember when I saw the cover for Memories in Beach House by Seaside Lovers, I was so struck by the artwork that I ordered it without even listening or reading much about it. It’s a painting of a woman floating alone in an endless ocean, with deep-fried magenta clouds on the horizon. The record itself sounds exactly as serene as the cover would suggest.”

Grounded: Making the Best of Things With Dire Straits

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 04:08:00 +0000

I decide that I’m going to let Dire Straits soundtrack this snowy night, imprisoned in my room. “Sultans of Swing” becomes the winter song for me; for the rest of my life it would speak to me of snowdrifts and watching the TV to see if my school would be closing in the morning."

The Cozy Domesticity of Carly Simon

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 04:08:00 +0000

““Coming Around Again” is truly as domestic as it gets. A perfectly blissful portrait is initially painted of a life that is “So good on paper/So romantic” but the tone gradually shifts to “Then you break a window/Burn the soufflé/Scream the lullaby.” There’s a realness to it, showing that as wonderful and unified as family life can be, it can also be difficult and unbearable.”

Talking to Yacht Rock Expert "Hollywood" Steve Huey

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 04:07:00 +0000

“At this point, JD had started calling it yacht rock. Because you look at the cover of Loggins and Messina’s Full Sail album, they’re on a boat. They’re very, very happy to be on a boat. You look at the back cover, they’re so happy. They’re so happy the shirts come off. They’re in the California sun on a boat. They’re making rock star money. They had boats.”

The Stereo-Versus-Mono Conundrum Circa 1964

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 03:08:00 +0000

“The record bin at Thrifty Drug Store in La Mirada, California, where I stood, was admittedly full of my parents’ soul-crushing music: the Ray Conniff Singers, Vic Damone, the Mills Brothers. But on this bright sunny day in late January 1964, it held something more, the Holy Grail, fresh off the delivery truck: Meet the Beatles!, the group’s first album from Capitol.”

Punk Rock May Not Have Saved My Life, But Jeff Rosenstock Helped Me To Improve It

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 04:12:00 +0000

“And the first song on there, the very first line is “will you still love me after I’ve fucked up?” It had been a long two years since I lost my friend and almost lost my partner. I’d done a lot of 12 hour drives for work, thinking about that last talk with her, thinking about all of the other things I’d lost throughout my life– bands, opportunities, moments in time, dead friends, dead family– mourning it all, crying and punching my steering wheel while Jeff tells me that “growing and changing doesn’t change the stuff”

George Thorogood and the 47 Year Grudge

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 04:08:00 +0000

“I have a list of grudges. Some of them are new (Juan Soto) and some go back to 1980 (Teri from high school). But my oldest grudge, going back 47 years, is against musician George Thorogood. When I tell people this, I get a lot of questions. What could mild-mannered George Thorogood have done to you? Mild-mannered? The man was bad to the bone! He said it himself!”

Q&A REmix with Seven Black

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 04:07:00 +0000

Q&A Remix is a frequent column on IHTOV in which people from all walks of life answer a set of questions about their vinyl collection. Today we welcome Seven Black of the band Headlight Rivals.

Have you ever bought a record just for the artwork?

Tons! I have 25 copies of Whipped Cream and Other Delights , and couple of spoofs of that Herb Alpert classic .

What is your most memorable vinyl buying/receiving experience?

Talking With Rich Wilhelm

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 04:19:00 +0000

“I’m a writer and editor, and I live in Royersford, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia, with my wife and I’ve been collecting records for about 50 years. I’d say actively, I do not remember a time in my life when I did not have records. I had 45s and a little tiny collection of albums when I was very, very young that had been passed on to me.”

Reelin' in the Years - Catching Up With Steely Dan

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 04:11:00 +0000

The timing felt right. I clicked on Aja and was transported to that basement party and the sweet awkwardness of Jacques. I listened to the whole album, then made my way backward through the band’s discography, hitting on all the songs that brought it all back: the football field at school, Pinball Palace, Field 6 at Eisenhower Park, the bus to Jones Beach.

“It is not just music for most of us”: Notes on Raein and Records From Departed Friends

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 04:10:00 +0000

“Elsewhere in the world, the raw anarchist spirit of the underground still thrives. Turn your ear toward Europe and you can hear young screamo bands collaborating on split 7” singles, hammering out philosophical rhapsodies. For them, it’s more like revolutions per second.

45s and Summer

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 06:13:00 +0000

“My baby sister’s room had air conditioning. At that time, mine did not. My baby sister’s room had a (Fisher-Price) record player. At that time, mine did not. But I had 45s, and whenever my mom was in the pool with my sisters, I would run into Lisa’s room and start playing records. I’d run the air conditioner full blast, close the door, and dance around in my bathing suit to the likes of “Brand New Key.” My hairbrush microphone skills were unmatched.”

Musings On Herbie Hancock & The Headhunters - Head Hunters (Columbia Records, 1973)

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 06:12:00 +0000

“I guess quite simply put, Head Hunters always has and always will be the epitome of “cool” to me: the meandering, yet extremely well thought-out instrumental sounds heard within, the sheer idea of being bold/brazen enough to call the band The Headhunters and the album Head Hunters, the ascending and ultimately descending whistle sound “Watermelon Man” is effortlessly built, layered, and torn apart around, and the album cover showcasing Hancock wearing a yellow gold-colored African kple kple mask of the Baoulé tribe from the Ivory Coast.”

Q&A Remix With Kevin Alexander

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 06:12:00 +0000

" I wasn’t looking for Cloudland when I walked into my local record shop a couple of years ago—in fact, I rarely know what I’m looking for when I go in. And even when I do, I usually either toss that list, come up with something totally different, or both. But the universe has a funny way of gifting you things when you least expect them. In much the same accidental way I came across their CD all those many years ago, I came across a vinyl copy, misfiled under the wrong letter."

The Lost Record Collection of NY Punk Legend Robert Quine

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 08:15:00 +0000

“Robert Wolfe Quine was a brilliant guitar player who had been an integral part of the New York/CBGB punk scene during its heyday. He went on to work with Tom Waits, Lou Reed, They Might Be Giants, Brian Eno, Matthew Sweet, and Richard Hell and the Voidoids to name a few. But, despite being such a genius of the instrument, he passed away and remains unknown to most.

Darkest Days: Depression and Stabbing Westward

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 04:10:00 +0000

“Sometimes, an album comes along at just the right time, a perfect match for your mood and your place in life; so much so that for a while it becomes your personality. For me, that time was in late 1998, and the album was Stabbing Westward’s Darkest Days.”

Pure Phase by Spiritualized 30th Anniversary

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 04:13:00 +0000

" This year marks the 30th anniversary of the release of Pure Phase, the overlooked second album by beloved neo-psych space rockers Spiritualized. The album occupies an interesting spot in their discography as it’s sandwiched between their widely acclaimed and influential debut album Lazer Guided Melodies, and their canonized masterpiece, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space."

How a High School Radio Station Became Chicagoland’s First FM Rock Revolution

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 04:02:00 +0000

“Tucked in a barely ventilated room in the corner of the drama department’s rehearsal room, in 1966, WRHS, 88.1 FM with its group of high school music rebels became the first Chicagoland FM station to play rock-and-roll music. Wikipedia credits WLS-FM as Chicago’s first commercial FM station to play rock-and-roll in 1968.”

What's to Love - A Selection of Love Songs

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 03:55:00 +0000

" Paul McCartney may have penned the ultimate song about love songs, but it’s not a love song in itself. What makes a good love song probably differs in the eyes of most of everyone, because the answers are vastly different as if you asked “What is love?”

Q&A Remix With Malia DelaCruz (Ciao Malz)

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 03:01:00 +0000

Q&A Remix is a frequent column on IHTOV in which people from all walks of life answer a set of questions about their vinyl collection. Today we welcome Malia DelaCruz (Ciao Malz)

What is your most memorable vinyl buying/receiving experience?

On my first trip to San Francisco, I had to check out Amoeba Records after watching so many YouTube videos about it as a kid. As I was strolling through, I made eye contact with Slow Dance in the Cosmos by Porches. In that moment, it felt like they had everything. Porches was a local band that my best friend Sam and I used to see live. I originally bought the album for him but ended up keeping it.

Only In Dreams - on Weezer's Blue Album

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 03:55:00 +0000

“He was right. “Only in Dreams” is a devastating song, a closer appropriate for such a grand album. It makes the record stay with you. It sits in your heart and sits in your soul. It causes you to ache and yearn, and, no, it’s not just the words. The guitar does so much work in this song. I imagine the sheer emotion of that instrumental part really struck my son while he was replicating it; the same way it struck me upon hearing it for the first time in 1994.”

On Grimes and Art Angels

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 03:54:00 +0000

“I was barely holding it together mentally and financially, with little room for solace. But that solace, like always, showed itself in the form of music. It was around this time that I first heard the lead single off of Art Angels, Grimes’ follow-up to her breakthrough opus Visions. “Flesh Without Blood” is a richly layered song, mixed perfectly so as to be structured like a rock song but as deeply engrossing as a dream-pop one.

The Record Stores of my Life

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 04:17:00 +0000

“A good record store has a very specific smell to it. I’m assaulted by it, in the best possible way, the second I walk into Looney Tunes. It brings me back to working at Record World, to shopping at Jimmy’s Music World and Uncle Phil’s and Mr. Cheapo’s. I can’t define that smell, but I just know it brings me an inner peace, a sense of being home.”

The Brian Jonestown Massacre - Their Satanic Majesties' Second Request

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 04:16:00 +0000

“A spiritual sequel to the forbidden British record, the Eastern-influenced neo-psychedelia made a statement for the ages, a piece that fills the record stores and shelves of music nerds of a plethora of generations of music lovers. For this album, the trip it will send a first-timer on lasts a lifetime.”

Hello, It's Me: My Intro to Todd Rundgren

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 01:16:00 +0000

“The first time I consciously heard “Hello It’s Me” was in 1975. I’m sure I’d heard it before; it came out in 1972, when I was ten. Chances are I heard it on the radio, either the staticky AM station my mom listened to, or one of the FM stations I spun the dial to on the living room stereo. It just didn’t register with me until I was 13, a teenager in every expanded sense of the word—surly, emotional, indifferent, and all those other things teenagers can be.

Post by Bjork; Aquemini by Outkast and Connecting the Two

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 01:15:00 +0000

“Both of these collections are of their time and outside of time. Post is the sonified, personified “irrational exuberance” from 1995 that would go unnamed until Alan Greenspan’s speech a year later. Post what? Post everything. Aquemini was born in 1998, when AOL had hastened the digital transformation of our commons to something cutthroat, getting communal bulletin boards onto the internet—the iterative, rapid-fire dialectical response to culture and creation were just beginning, and people were ready to remix. They chart out the first steps of a world going through a major adaptive process, one which people would now”

You're My Favorite Thing

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 04:18:00 +0000

“A conversation about what it means to be a fan of a band; what your favorite band says about you; how your favorite band stands the test of good, bad, and indifferent times; and how the same goes for your oldest, dearest friends.”

GUTS - Listening to "Young" Music as an Adult

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 06:15:00 +0000

" I thought of this while listening to Olivia Rodrigo’s GUTS. Most of the music I listen to is angst-driven, emotional. It’s what appeals to me. Rodrigo manages to capture that type of music, and she backs it with hooks for days. The album is a perfect storm of two things I enjoy: crying and rocking out. Maybe rocking out while crying."

Fairuz in America

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 06:09:00 +0000

“Fairouz is a known name to anyone who speaks Arabic, as a legendary singer from Lebanon who had been active since 1950, she graced many generations with her voice and her music, and as an Arab Christian family, we held a special appreciation for her as all of our Arabic Christmas jingles were sung by her, and she was almost a part of our family every Christmas gathering.”

At the Drive-In: The Relationship of Command

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 12:54:00 +0000

At the Drive-In released “Relationship of Command” on September 12, 2000. I had just turned 19 the month before, standing at a crossroads of hearing this and The Refused’ “The Shape of Punk to Come” – both fundamentally changing me, daring me to re-examine what music was, what I thought songs could sound like."

My 45s: Seasons in the Sun

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 04:23:00 +0000

“The song went on, and I took it all in, too mesmerized by the lyrics to turn the channel. The singer, Terry Jacks, was saying goodbye to the people he loved before he died. Like, he had totally accepted his death already and was telling other people to accept it as well. To me, this was a new way of thinking about dying.

Q&A Remix With John Yslas

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 04:21:00 +0000

“Some of the most meaningful connections in my life have come from camping out for Record Store Day, and that experience will always remind me of how music can bring people together.

Lost in Translation

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 15:29:00 +0000

“We started trading CDs. Well, it was kind of one-sided. He sent two. I sent several, all with handwritten annotations for each song. I packed those fuckers full of emo, indie, rock, metal, whatever I could think of that would help him get to know me and possibly fall deeply in love with me. It was like making mixtapes, but also nothing like that”

Urban Hymns

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 11:28:00 +0000

“So, I had a little red record player with my strange amplifier glowing in the dim light of my living room. One of the first albums I purchased was The Verve. Listening to Urban Hymns one night I found myself so caught up in the lyrics that I forgot it was an album”

You and Your Musical Rut

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 13:55:00 +0000

“Trust me, you’re going to regret it someday if all you have to go with when making a playlist called “Remember That Summer After High School When We Got Wasted Every Day At The Beach House?” is a 40-minute loop of T-Pain being featured on other people’s songs.”

Fish Heads and Dead Puppies: In Search of Demented Vinyl

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 05:07:00 +0000

“From there, I plunged deeper into the world of novelty vinyl. One of my next quests led me to Ogden Edsl’s “Dead Puppies.” The song, a darkly comedic ode to neglected pets, became one of Dr. Demento’s most requested tunes. Released in 1977, the original pressing was even harder to track down than “Fish Heads.” When I finally unearthed a copy at a flea market in Garden City, the vendor gave me a knowing smirk. “Dr. Demento fan, huh?” he said. I nodded. He threw in a battered copy of “Shaving Cream” by Benny Bell for free.”

Q&A Remix With Kory Adams

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 05:07:00 +0000

“The album art featured the band members wearing white buttonups with long red ascots and shimmering gold pants with gold suspenders, the men with full pants and the women wearing bootyshorts. It was not at all emblematic of the music I liked at the time, but the cover made me laugh. I still have it!”

Tommy: My First Album Love

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 04:04:00 +0000

" Tommy opened the door for me. It allowed me to be receptive to listening to all kinds of music. It played a role in my discovering Black Sabbath two years later, which changed my life. It made me a lifelong fan of the Who. It told me a wild, bizarre story I would never forget.

An Interview With Kavi Alexander of Water Lily Acoustics

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 04:03:00 +0000

“So anyway, I bought all the Folkways and Connoisseur and Lord Pacific and Le Chant du Monde and the Cora recordings I could find. And I noticed that the recordings were not as great as the Western records, like jazz or western classical music. So that was when I decided that this is what I want to do with my life, to start making recordings. So that was the real thrust.”

You're So Viscious: a tale of friendship and Lou Reed

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 04:30:00 +0000

“She was younger but knew all the cool music before I did, thanks to her older brothers. We’d sit in her room, and she’d play records for me and rattle off facts about each album, each song. Sometimes the songs were new to me, sometimes they were familiar”

My Vinyl Collection Journey

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 04:27:00 +0000

“The “hunt” of shopping is a huge part of the hobby’s appeal for myself. I occasionally buy records I have not heard before, usually within the two to five dollar range. Through chance encounters, I have the opportunity to explore new music or come across old favorites”

Closer I Am to Fine: A Lifetime with The Indigo Girls

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 03:56:00 +0000

““I’m trying to tell you something ‘bout my life.” The words feel like a hand extended across time, reaching to my eighth-grade self in 1989. That was the year the Indigo Girls released their first record, and though I can’t recall exactly when or where I first heard them, I know I fell in love instantly.”

Simple Math

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 03:37:00 +0000

“The album stayed with me, a beacon on cold winter nights when I wanted to be warmed by memories of temperate days. It was my walking album; it was my driving album. Simple Math was a part of the fabric of my life.”

Collecting Cal Tjader Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Jazz

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 04:08:00 +0000

“Cal Tjader opened my eyes to jazz as a genre and as I started collecting more and more records, an increasing percentage of my purchases were jazz. As of the time of writing this, my record collection stands at 1344 records, 350 of which are jazz.

Five Years On: Lockdown Music

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 04:07:00 +0000

“It’s not the fault of Soccer Mommy (Sophia Allison) that her album came out at the end of February, thus ushering in the Covid era. It’s just a matter of circumstance. For me, it was the right place, right time. Soccer Mommy’s Color Theory became my musical mantra, my guide, my solace.”

The Trials and Tribulations of Finding A Perfect Turntable

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 05:14:00 +0000

" Assuming a more advanced hi-fi setup was too expensive and complicated, I gave up playing records for a while. Things would change though on Christmas of 2022 when my wonderful girlfriend (now wife) Sarah, bought me a new record: Florence and the Machine’s Lungs."

You Should Be Dancing

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 03:56:00 +0000

“I spent a lot of my alone time in my room, listening to disco and feeling somewhat ashamed, as if I was betraying my friends. I was listening to Chic, KC and the Sunshine Band, Rose Royce, and Tavares. I loved the slow-dancing disco as much as the fast-dancing tunes, and I moved around my room like I was in Studio 54, minus the cocaine. I didn’t tell a soul.”

Let's Dance - Songs of my Youth Volume 1

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 11:54:00 +0000

“My father pulls up in his blue Impala convertible just as “Earth Angel” is about to end. I run up to the driveway to greet him and practically propel him onto the lawn, so he can dance with me and my sister to the end of the song”

Kansas City Jazz and Searching for Records

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 08:20:00 +0000

“Current radio hits aside, you could only enjoy the music if you had it in your hands. Collecting was, like the format itself, hands-on and all analog. So finding a coveted rarity took legwork, sleuthing, and patience. And my dad loved nothing more than being a vinyl Sherlock. "

Wallowing with the National's First Two Pages of Frankenstein

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 05:16:00 +0000

“At first, I did not listen to it on vinyl. I needed to listen on streaming, so I could stop after each song and gather my thoughts and cry if I needed to. And lord, did I need to.”

Once Upon a Time: Captain Fantastic Turns 50

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 04:14:00 +0000

“There is also a poster of the album’s cover art, emblazoned with the words “from the end of the world to your town.” The poster quickly goes up on the wall of my bedroom, where it will hang for several years, even after I leave home, until one of my brothers moves into the room.

Mailbag #1

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 04:13:00 +0000

In which Martin Shkreli tries to buy me a Deftones album

The Lost Art of the Mixtape

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 12:51:00 +0000

“They had to flow into one another. Each song needed to be a continuation of the one before it, as if all these disparate bands got together and recorded a concept album based solely on your feelings for the guy who sits in front of you in English class.

Talking With James Cassar

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 03:55:00 +0000

“One day I tweeted it, my Discogs link, and I said, if it’s 12 inch, 20 bucks, if it’s anything smaller than that 10. And there were a lot of rare seven inches that I had, rare splits, compilations and things like that and I just let people have at it.

The Musical Ties That Bind

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 15:27:00 +0000

“She is three, and we’re at an outdoor flea market. I stop by the middle-aged guy selling records and flip through some bins of mostly classic rock albums. She’s in her stroller, and I notice she’s agitated and pointing at something. She’s kicking her legs excitedly, saying, “I want that record!” It’s Green Day’s Dookie.”

Nowhere, Man: Searching for Rubber Soul

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 03:43:00 +0000

“Let’s get this out of the way. I don’t like the Beatles. I don’t take pride in this, and I swear I’m not being contrarian. I just was never able to connect with any of their music. I think a big factor in whether a person born in the 80s would love the Beatles is if their parents were Beatles fans and raised them the “right” way. My parents didn’t provide such an upbringing”

Joshua Tree, Bullet the Blue Sky, and 9/11

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 16:41:00 +0000

the bomb sniffing dogs and the people milling about, not sure of where to go or what to do now. Everyone was shell-shocked.

Q&A With Ankur Razdan (with bonus essay)

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 05:21:00 +0000

“So now I have 4 (started with 5) trashbags full of 45s sitting in my cellar. One at a time I keep a bag up in my home office and every morning I carry out a ritual: I grab a few 45s, discard their dirty sleeves, clean them with vinyl cleaning solution, repackage them in fresh sleeves which I order in bulk, and pile them up (and listen, of course.)

Singable Songs For the Very Young (and Old)

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 05:16:00 +0000

It was a silly song, which was just fine, as it was for the very young, not five twentysomething record store clerks who listened to the likes of Flipper.

No Band Does Vinyl Packaging Like mewithoutYou

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 05:12:00 +0000

“We all have our reasons for loving vinyl. It’s a format you can hold close. There’s that special substance about it that demands attention and makes you feel like you’re getting something real, something tangible”

Q&A Remix With Jason Bombach

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 05:00:00 +0000

The Q&A Remix is a frequent column on IHTOV in which people from all walks of life answer a set of pre-written questions about their record collection. Today we welcome Jason Bombach.

Have you ever bought a record just for the artwork?

This may surprise you since I wrote a whole column about album art but, of course I’ve bought albums just based on artwork. It’s a great way to break out of a musical rut. It’s harder to justify than it used to be with prices as they are, but it’s fun to jump into the unknown. I have this record, I can’t even remember the band now, but the sleeve is just two pieces of a cardboard box with some abstract silk screening on it. It’s a strange record that I never would have heard if the art wasn’t so weird that it caught my eye.

There Was a Time - on Uncle Tupelo

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 04:35:00 +0000

Their best songs, spread across four albums in just a few years, gave voice to a uniquely Midwestern blend of hope, desperation, determination, and alcoholism.

Chicago 2: Love At First Skate

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 04:33:00 +0000

Maybe Chicago 2 isn’t as bad as I remember it. Maybe there’s more to the album than a schmaltzy love song that reminds me of a love never found.

Ain't That Close to Love - Bowie, Pinball, and Me

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 05:35:00 +0000

We would throw a few quarters into the jukebox (three plays for twenty five cents!), and play the same lineup each time. Led Zeppelin. Todd Rundgren. Bowie.

Q&A Remix With Daniel Graham of Great Wide Nothing

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 05:34:00 +0000

I’ve been hunting a good mono copy of Magical Mystery Tour by The Beatles. As a general rule of thumb Beatles albums always sound better in mono.

A Wink And a Nod - How a long lost record connected me with my past

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 09:48:00 +0000

That Ed—gorgeous, talented, affable Ed—was part of this band that made this album was amazing to me. I was convinced that Wink was going to make it big. They were going to be rock stars. And I could say I knew them.

Mike Monteiro

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 03:36:00 +0000

When you pull out that record, you’re not remembering the music on that record. You’re remembering that connection. You’re remembering the whole circumstance that brought that record to your house.

Remembering Steely Dan 2.0: Two Against Nature at 25

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 03:36:00 +0000

The leap day release was one last joke on everyone, a deliberate tweak of an anxious fan base after a two-decade wait for a new album.

Low's "Great Destroyer"

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 03:34:00 +0000

All of Low’s discography shines on vinyl, but The Great Destroyer has always been the record I spin the most. It’s a record that consumes you

Q&A Remix With Ken French

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 03:41:00 +0000

The Q&A Remix is a frequent column on IHTOV in which people from all walks of life answer a set of pre-written questions about their vinyl collection. Today we welcome Clash fan Ken French.

Have you ever bought a record just for the artwork?

Mastodon’s Leviathan LP, though I grew to like it.

What is your most memorable vinyl buying experience?

When the shop owner sold me the last copy he had of The Clash’s Combat Rock on the day of release because I was a regular there.

A Few Thoughts on Manning Fireworks

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 03:35:00 +0000

The best compliment I can give goes to Manning Fireworks: I am genuinely disappointed when the album ends

Running With Radiohead

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 04:46:00 +0000

I finally got so frustrated at my indecisiveness in choosing running music that I put everything on shuffle. I decided to let fate handle it. Fate settled on Radiohead’s “Let Down.”

The Brief But Memorable Adventures of Bob and Me

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 04:46:00 +0000

I’d like to think I’ve made up for lost time, but it almost doesn’t matter that I came to London Calling late. Whenever you first experience a brilliant work of art, it’s always the right time.

Talking About "Vinyl Nation" With Christopher Boone and Kevin Smokler

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 04:44:00 +0000

…if you put any of those 45 people in a room and they’d never met each other, they would be fast friends. And even though they came from totally different places in life, different backgrounds, different beliefs; their passion for records, and even if the genres are different, would just connect them immediately.

Q&A Remix With Chris Payne

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 07:36:00 +0000

… that thrill of opening up new vinyl packaging and—sometimes—getting surprised with a gorgeous interior design or cool liner notes you weren’t expecting.

Born in the USA: A Baseball Story

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 03:31:00 +0000

There was something for every Bruce fan on this album: everyone who wanted catharsis, everyone who wanted something fun, everyone who wanted something that punched them in the face, that didn’t deal in the subtleties of Nebraska. We got an anthem. We got a love song. We got it all. For Hank, it was more than that. The album became his entire personality, and it was coming to a head in July 1985.

One Person's Paradise: How Bat Out of Hell Became My Nemesis

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 04:46:00 +0000

All the people who had been sitting on their asses for the great dance songs all night were suddenly lined up on the floor. Males formed a line down one side; females did the same on the other side.

Mike Rastiello on Building His Record Set Up

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 04:07:00 +0000

It was a dark, damp room; oh man, there was the receiver. They still had speakers set up to it to show me that it worked. I plugged in my iPod into the AUX in port, a hilarious meeting of technology decades apart.

Reckoning With Reckoning

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 12:37:00 +0000

When I was lost in Reckoning, I wasn’t alone, I wasn’t afraid. The music centered me, healed me.

Q&A Remix With Chris Ingalls

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 04:08:00 +0000

My sisters were never really into finding rare records, buying stacks of records at a time, filling in gaps in their collections, stuff like that; they just liked listening to music. My brother and I turned it into an obsession, and we couldn’t have done it without them.

Scarred for Life

Fri, 21 Feb 2025 04:31:00 +0000

Your vibe is more that of a hair metal connoisseur, a devotee of the Aquanet set, a genre that’s subject to even more ridicule than the Heavy Metal Parking Lot wannabes who smoke rollies and give out stick and poke tats at the fringe of the ragged school lawns.

Pater Noster and the Mission of Light: a Horror Movie And an Ode to Records

Fri, 21 Feb 2025 04:30:00 +0000

There’s a meme I once saw that I felt rang true: “Hippies are mean people pretending to be nice and punks are nice people pretending to be mean.” Every generation sucks though when you get down to it. Because, as Deja Venus states in the movie: “people, in general, are assholes.”

Follow the Leader - Nu-Metal and Me

Fri, 21 Feb 2025 04:23:00 +0000

I spent a lot of time on AOL and that is where I met Justin, a guy half my age who found my AOL profile by searching the string “incubus korn limp bizkit.” Justin was the epitome of nu-metal fan. Young, white, angry, bitter. He wore Jnco jeans and band t-shirts and had a wallet chain hanging from his pocket.

That's Ballgame - Lessons Learned from Kevin Devine's "Make the Clocks Move"

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 08:14:00 +0000

I wanted to stop the song. I wanted to start it over again. I wanted to hear the part about it being not a pattern but a phase. It’s what you’ve become and it’s what you will stay rang in my head. I was on the first stanza and already feeling choked up

Q&A Remix With Fritz Myers

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 04:33:00 +0000

bought a couple albums, but the experience of wandering the aisles talking with those guys, catching up on who we’d become lately; conversations about kids and work peppered with “oooooh, look at this…” makes it a special memory.

I Had That on Vinyl: Black Pear Tree by the Mountain Goats and Kaki King

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 04:23:00 +0000

That piece of vinyl, mottled black and yellow, was on my turntable a lot, in good times and especially in hard. The anger of “Mosquito Repellent” felt real and earned when I too hoped that the bad guys would win, that the good guys would get their heads bashed in.

Nick Cave's Boatman's Call and Losing Music in a Breakup

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 04:54:00 +0000

I had tied two good things together, and when one of them went bad, they both did. Nick Cave was gone from my life, as if I had divorced him and not my husband.

Talking Weezer With Stephen Lopez

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 04:54:00 +0000

It [the blue album] changed me in ways I can’t articulate. It was clearly a turning point in terms of me as a human and I just latched on like a leech. I couldn’t let go.

Beach Beat Classics

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 03:45:00 +0000

You can dice vegetables to Carolina Beach Music. Whatever is in an oily frying pan just smells better when “Give Me Just a Little More Time” by the Chairmen of the Board bops on in the background.

Q&A Remix With Ankur Razdan

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 03:48:00 +0000

…it feels like a far more important endeavor to be archiving and preserving these relics from the past that show where the musical tradition has been and helps us inform ourselves what it means to us now.

Jesus Christ, Superstar: All That Talk About God

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 03:38:00 +0000

I had a lot of questions that would probably never be answered. Not by my Catholic school teachers, not by mother, not by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber. For all its evident flaws, Superstar radicalized me religiously

Pilgrimage Has Gained Momentum

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 05:25:00 +0000

While there, we learned about the reputation of Berry, Buck, Mills and Stipe locally. My suspicions were correct: They are solid dudes that everyone pretty much likes.

Jael Holzman

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 10:49:00 +0000

When we made Pink Balloons, the vinyl and the whole accoutrements, the whole deal was always about trying to create an experience for people. And a lot of that’s colored by how important vinyl is to me.

A Valentine to John Grant's "GMF"

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 04:31:00 +0000

…we were sat in the front row of the Brighton Dome, when John Grant walked on stage, sat down at the piano, and let forth his stunning voice. It may not have been love at first sight, but it was something close.

Q&A Remix With Josh Gondelman

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 04:31:00 +0000

And old comedy stuff is always such a trip to sift through. It’s a lot of the classic albums you expect to find and then you’ll see something like Fartin’ Johnny Parton and the Armpit Orchestra.

Transcontinental Platters

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 06:34:00 +0000

…among my first buys were R.E.M., Graham Parker, Pretenders and The Replacement’s Tim. I still have most of them; some are worth a bit of money, but worth even more to me sentimentally.

The National's Boxer: Waiting For Winter to Leave

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 21:58:00 +0000

There’s something within this album that sparks my soul, making me realize that it’s not quite yet empty in there. It reminds me that I once had a full heart, once had someone who loved me, who was a willing partner in sleeping through winter together.

Q&A Remix With Justin Cox

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 21:52:00 +0000

I once ran through the falling snow down Addison Street just outside of Wrigley Field to try and catch an L Train while listening to Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.

The Everest Archive of Folk and Jazz and Label Design

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 06:03:00 +0000

I realized my beloved series was more of an afterthought - something issued in the waning days of the company, long after its founder had been ousted.

Redefining my Life WIth Incubus' S.C.I.E.N.C.E.

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 19:48:00 +0000

By the time it was over for the second time, I had signed onto AOL and changed my screen name from DuHast to Redefined.

Q&A Remix With Tina Roumeliotis

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 14:04:00 +0000

The Q&A Remix is a frequent column on IHTOV in which people from all walks of life answer a set of pre-written questions about their vinyl collection. Today we welcome writer Tina Roumeliotis.

Have you ever bought a record just for the artwork?

YES! I have a few where I bought an extra to frame and of course if the alternate cover/variant was pretty! Some are just too perfect to resist!

Author Libby Cudmore

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 04:04:00 +0000

“Sometimes I’ll just put on 1960s Cocktail Jazz, just really fun, exotic, like Martin Denny. I like to think of myself as a 1960s dinner party hostess.”

Songs for the Deaf: I Need a Saga. What's the Saga?

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 04:30:00 +0000

" I did a lot of thinking and contemplating, but I also just let the music play sometimes, let it take me away to a faraway desert road with the cow skulls and cacti."

Q&A Remix With Tim Gavin

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 04:29:00 +0000

The Q&A Remix is a frequent column on IHTOV in which people from all walks of life answer a set of pre-written questions about their vinyl collection. Today we welcome Tim Gavin.

Have you ever bought a record just for the artwork?

I’ve streamed, and purchased many albums purely for the artwork. My first time doing this was picking up a copy of Pelagial by German Post-Metal band The Ocean, but that was on CD. Shiho Yabuki’s The Body is a Message of the Universe was probably the first vinyl record I’ve bought just by the artwork. I was poking through my usual place, 2nd Thoughts up in Prince George, BC, Canada. The artwork was different from the original album art, instead opting for a photo of Shiho Yabuki herself, but what had me so interested was that the art made this ambient record seem a little more DIY than I’d expect an ambient record from 1987 to be. It made me want to hear first hand how this record sounded. Sure enough, anytime I need to relax, this has become a go-to listen for me.

Judge a Record by It's Cover: What Makes Good Album Art

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 20:52:00 +0000

Hello and welcome to a hopefully recurring column called ‘Judge a Record by Its Cover,’ where we explore the art and science of record packaging and presentation. The importance of album art is often overlooked when thinking about a record you are putting out. You might be thinking you’ll just slap some random band photo on there and call it a day. After all, it’s the music that really matters right? Well, while technically correct, the music is ultimately what matters most, just like when everyone scrolls through Tinder, people usually only pick up the records that they find aesthetically pleasing. So while a good album cover won’t make up for terrible music, it can get people to listen in the first place.

Q&A Remix With Marcus Nuccio

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 06:05:00 +0000

Once, I went into the Record Exchange in Princeton, NJ and they had every Boards Of Canada record in stock. I had to grab them all!

Reach With Richard Simmons

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 04:00:00 +0000

Look, I’m not gonna beat around the bush here. This is not a very good album. It currently has a 1.81 rating on RYM and I think it earns it. But give the man some credit! Workout records were fairly common in the 80’s (even Arnold Schwarzenegger had one, and believe me when I say you need to hear it), but they mostly used songs that were already popular. Richard Simmons insisted on writing original tunes.

Down in the Tube Station With the Jam

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 03:59:00 +0000

Inside the case, Patrick had stuffed a sheet of yellow legal paper, folded about a hundred times. I opened it up and it was the lyrics to the Jam’s “Down in the Tube Station at Midnight,” a track from their 1978 album All Mod Cons, which also appears on the Snap! tape I held in my hand.

The Progressive Path: From Long Island Record Stores to Canterbury Dreams

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 04:41:00 +0000

Each trip meant taking the train into Penn Station with an empty backpack and returning with it full of vinyl treasures, carefully wrapped in brown paper bags to protect against the elements.

Finding Joy in New Day Rising

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 11:48:00 +0000

New Day Rising woke something in me. Every song brought with it a swell of resurgence, and of the need to feel everything deeply.

Q&A Remix With Logan Archer Mounts

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 04:15:00 +0000

I have learned to accept that vinyl is my biggest passion in life. Music as a whole, truly, but the vinyl aspect has anchored me fully. My obsession increased tenfold during the COVID years, when I had nothing to do but listen to my collection.

Handle With Care: the Comfort of the Traveling Wilburys

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 07:07:00 +0000

I dressed her on the changing table in the small corner of our apartment and I sang the “Handle With Care” to her over and over while I paced the living room, the hallway, the kitchen, holding her in my arms and willing her to stop crying.

Mystique and Deceit in R.E.M. Album Art

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 04:01:00 +0000

Back home in Pennsylvania, the next trip to the record store sent me straight to the “R” bin: did they have any other records? “Murmur” was already acquired, but the bin also held a blue-covered EP titled “chronic town.” Yes, I’ll have that one too.

Dan Ozzi

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 03:17:00 +0000

I really, really miss being able to enjoy my music in a non-digital way. I miss just looking at my records and seeing a record that I forgot I had and putting that on.

It's Different For Girls - Joe Jackson and an Unlikely Friendship

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 03:58:00 +0000

It was speaking to me, telling me not only that there was so much more out there beyond the Zeppelin and Springsteen music I was absorbed in, there was music in between those two that I hadn’t yet explored.

After the Fire - Scott Dudelson Reflects on Losing His Record Collection in the Palisades Fire

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 03:03:00 +0000

It sucks, but what am I going to do? I’m going to either have a breakdown on it, or I’m just gonna just enjoy life, and I’m gonna buy the records I want, and maybe find a new way to refocus how I collect and what I collect

Q&A Remix With Niko Stratis

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 03:03:00 +0000

I’ve always loved to hoard things, and to hold something physical. I collected VHS tapes, cassettes, CDs. Video games. Everything was a collection to me, it gave me something to organize and catalog and build my life around.

How "Brat" Helped Me FInd Autistic Joy

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 09:59:00 +0000

As a recently diagnosed autistic adult, who’s been labeled loud, messy, selfish and honest to a fault, I had been unwittingly living a brat summer for my entire life.

Love, Hate, and Growth on Long Island With Billy Joel

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 08:51:00 +0000

As I age, I find myself softening some of my stances. I find myself being less of a hater. I am 62. I don’t have time in my life to viscerally hate things anymore; it wastes energy, it wastes precious minutes, it wastes your heart away if you let it.

Talking with Illustrator Nicole Rifkin

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 16:50:00 +0000

I want to be like Questlove. Every interview he does he’s sitting in front of his record collection. I want that in my life. I want to have a record room.

Q&A Remix With Jay Gerland

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 12:23:00 +0000

Have you ever bought a record just for the artwork?

I think only if I’m at a thrift store and see something unusual. If it’s not the typical Humperdinck or Herb Alpert but has an interesting cover, I’d grab it. I’ve done this too many times and really need to unload this stuff.

What is your most memorable vinyl buying experience?

This could be The Smiths Meat Is Murder” My mom was always buying records and we would go on Wednesdays because they gave you double stamps (their reward program) and I remember her taking me to buy that album. One of the few that vanished from my collection over the years.

Laughing in Analog: How Cheech & Chong Led Me Down a Comedy Vinyl Rabbit Hole

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 05:03:00 +0000

That night, I placed the needle on “Sister Mary Elephant” and experienced comedy in a way my YouTube algorithm had never suggested. The crackle before the first “SHUT UP!” The perfectly timed pause between “Dave’s not here” and “No, man, I’m Dave!”

What a Long Strange Trip: How the Dead Helped Me Find Myself

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 06:10:00 +0000

I was barely 14 at the time. It was summer and I was about to transition from public school to Catholic school. I was a nervous wreck that I’d never make friends at the new school and my life would become more of a disaster than it already was. Little did I know that this fairly new copy of Steal Your Face would set in motion a sea change.

Q&A Remix With Chris Farren

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 05:42:00 +0000

The Q&A Remix is a frequent column on IHTOV in which people from all walks of life answer a set of pre-written questions about their vinyl collection. Today we welcome international rock star Chris Farren.

Q&A Remix With Lonny Starsky

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 09:35:00 +0000

I started collecting them freshman year of high school because Hot Topic did those splatter pressings of all the Blink-182 albums. I thought they looked cool and I wanted to waste money on cooler stuff because they stopped making Bionicles.

23 North: A Travelogue of Record Shopping in Ohio

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 03:51:00 +0000

I approached the check-out counter, staffed by a man who I assumed to be the owner, an older man with long gray-white hair and a thick beard. An archetype I would begin to know as, The Record Store Guy

Growing Up Zeppelin (the song remains the same)

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 02:37:00 +0000

[Liner Notes is a regular column in which I (michele) randomly choose albums from my collection to write about]

The 70s in the Long Island suburbs were all about forts and hideaways and private enclaves, barely hidden places where many firsts happened; first kisses, first heartbreaks, first harsh life lessons, all played out with a soundtrack that consisted mostly of Led Zeppelin.

The forts were clumsily put together hives, a 70s edition of today’s man-caves; we could call them boy-caves and you’d get the idea. Black light posters, candle holders made out of empty Miller quart bottles, Farrah Fawcett pinups and battered skateboards lining the walls. The most important items in each of these boy-caves were the ever-present turntable and stacks of rock and roll records. These forts were an enticement for a girl like me, one who just wanted to hear new music and was enthralled by the prospect of fresh albums, and perhaps a little beer stolen from dens when parents weren’t looking.

Diamonds and Rust

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 02:36:00 +0000

Some rare things are simply so significant, so powerful, that you are not meant to forget them, not in this lifetime at least. You carry them with you, what does it matter if they gradually become lighter or weigh you down with time? They will stay regardless.

I currently own a print of Diamonds and Rust that I purchased from some Italian guy for a little less than ten bucks a few months back. Naturally I was ecstatic about this find, and when I finally held it in my hands for the first time, I asked myself where I wanted to place it – we all know the crucial importance of the Record Collection Order. To me it’s a very intuitive process, I don’t really sort by year, genre, or even artist. In this case, my eyes immediately fell on Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. Putting these two next to each other felt exactly like the right and the wrong thing to do, but more on that later.

Q&A Remix With Brock Jerue

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 01:50:00 +0000

The Q&A Remix is a frequent column on IHTOV in which people from all walks of life answer a set of pre-written questions about their vinyl collection. Today we welcome Brock Jerue

Have you ever bought a record just for the artwork?

Absolutely - notably, REO Speedwagon’s You Can Tune a Piano, But You Can’t Tuna Fish. I bought this at an antique shop called Blue Shark Antiques & Collectibles in Fredericksburg, Virginia. It was the first record I ever actually spun on a turntable. Of course, I placed the needle wrong, which meant the first sounds out of my speakers were, “felt the tables turnin’!”

The Ghost of the Appleseed Cast's Sagarmatha

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 04:51:00 +0000

The Appleseed Cast reinvent themselves with each album, and I’m always interested to see where they’re going. I originally bought Sagarmatha on CD when it first came out, but during the pandemic I found a copy of the repress by Graveface Records at my favorite record store, The Love Garden in Lawrence, Kansas. I wasn’t expecting Sagarmatha to be the soundtrack to the haunted house I was raised in, but life is strange. The album is ambitious. It’s intoxicating, almost otherworldly. It’s been stuck in my brain since I first heard it many years ago.

Q&A Remix With Jeff Ash

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 03:44:00 +0000

The Q&A Remix is a frequent column on IHTOV in which people from all walks of life answer a set of pre-written questions about their vinyl collection. Today we welcome Jeff Ash

Have you ever bought a record just for the artwork?

Oh, sure. The all-timer is Hawaii Calls: Fire Goddess by Webley Edwards with Al Kealoha Perry from 1958. A vaguely cheesecake cover on which an exotic-looking topless woman holds flaming bowls in front of her, well, you get the idea. Another is Mambo, a 10-inch Xavier Cugat record from 1953. Another is Live at Someplace Else, a 1968 LP with a cool cover that was by a Minneapolis group called South 40, which turned out to be Crow before they were Crow and thus a fairly interesting record.

Ode to the Mountain Goats

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 04:22:00 +0000

My first exposure to the Mountain Goats was on YouTube, maybe 12 years ago, a video of them doing “No Children” live, where the audience was doing the heavy lifting in singing. The lyrics demolished me; the unbridled catharsis with which the audience sang floored me. There was such an obvious connection with John Darnielle and the band and I knew I had to find out more. Within a week, I was a superfan.

Kris Marinello of South Metro Music

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 01:53:00 +0000

There’s the stereotype of the grumpy record store guy, right? When we opened up, I was specifically trying to be like, hey, I don’t want to be the grumpy record store guy. I say hi to everybody when they come in, give a smile, try to chit chat or whatever. Don’t be the grumpy person.

In Defense of The Police (the band)

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 07:02:00 +0000

The first record I ever bought myself was a copy of The Police’s Reggatta de Blanc. I purchased it on a trip to my home state of New Jersey in 2015; I was 15 years old. I can authoritatively date this purchase because I felt compelled to post the purchase on my Instagram. At the time, if you asked me to pick any tour to see, I would have considered saying a show on the Outlandos D’Amour tour.

Q&A Remix with Gary and Chris Ingalls

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 03:36:00 +0000

Chris Ingalls interviewed his older brother, Gary, who currently owns around 3,000 records

My Springsteen Journey: fandom, divorce, and reconciliation

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 00:53:00 +0000

My first exposure to Bruce Springsteen was in 1973 when an older cousin played “Blinded by the Light” for me. I was intrigued by the song, I liked it enough, but not enough to dive into the album it was on. I was eleven. I had better things to do. The song stuck with me, though, and played in my head a lot. I enjoyed the pace of it, the wordplay. I also thought Bruce was hot.

Q&A Remix With Matt Carter

Sun, 19 Jan 2025 08:46:00 +0000

The Q&A Remix is a frequent column on IHTOV in which people from all walks of life answer a set of pre-written questions about their vinyl collection. Today we welcome my very own brother in law, Matt Carter

Have you ever bought a record just for the artwork?

I bought Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band solely for the artwork. When vinyl was dying in the 1990s I bought some album frames from a catalog. Maybe Hammacher Schlemmer, I don’t remember, but people my age used to love looking through the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog because it showed you how other people your age who were less savvy with their spending habits lived. These frames would allow you to display your album artwork in your home or office without having to build them yourself. They also paired well with The Best Tabletop Radio which is currently backordered until March. I mounted Trout Mask Replica along with a few others and decorated my basement stairway with them. People would come over and enviously gaze at them sometimes. I liked that. I would say things like “Maybe you can get some album frames for yourself…” and then I would do an extra long pause and then I would say “once you get a second job!” and then I would laugh out loud and slap them on the shoulders and say, “I’m just kidding, I’m just kidding” because you can say anything to people as long as you add that on the end. I also purchased Giant by Johnny “Guitar” Watson for the artwork, but I ended up actually liking that album, which never happened with Trout Mask Replica. I also own a picture disc of Frank Zappa’s Baby Snakes which Michele referred to as “aesthetically unpleasing” which makes me love it even more.

Learning to Let Go of Things

Sun, 19 Jan 2025 04:29:00 +0000

Confession: Even though I am writing this piece for a site for vinyl collecting, I don’t really have a vinyl collection! There is a reason for that: I was born in 1981 and have never owned a record player. While I have owned 60-70 LPs in my lifetime, I haven’t actually played the majority of them.

So, why do I own them? It started in college during the peak of the CD era when nobody listened to vinyl. It was the last year of the 90s, the tail end of “the End of History.” CDs were how we all listened to music and, as far as we were concerned, that was how it would be for the foreseeable future. By the end of the year, of course, Napster was officially a Thing and that was bad news for compact discs.

Jen Ramos Eisen

Sun, 19 Jan 2025 03:25:00 +0000

I was walking past someone, and I overheard them talking about Bruce Springsteen, and I mentioned, oh, I got to see Bruce Springsteen at Asbury Park this past year. And they’re like, no way you got to go to that show - which apparently is now like a legendary Springsteen show - and I felt like I gained so much sports writing credit.

This Story's Old: Reckoning with Brand New's "Deja Entendu" in 2025

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 02:20:00 +0000

I went a few years without listening to Brand New at all. There was a hole in my heart and a very large hole in my playlist. I would have bouts where I felt like I needed to hear a specific Brand New song, I’d cue it up on Spotify, hit play, and feel immense guilt, as if an unseen hand was pointing at me, accusing me, judging me. But it was really me judging myself. Part of me said it was ok, that I needed to hear them again, but there was a part that just wasn’t ready for that.

Q&A Remix With Nick Costa

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 08:04:00 +0000

The Q&A Remix is a frequent column on IHTOV in which people from all walks of life answer a set of pre-written questions about their vinyl collection. Today we welcome friend of the blog Nick Costa

Have you ever bought a record just for the artwork?

Definitely. Many times. The most memorable one was technically a CD, but back in 2007 or 2008 I had $5 to kill on a Best Buy gift card. I went in and on display was an album that said “$4.99” and the artwork looked cool. Figured it was essentially free so I had nothing to lose. That album was Not Animal. by Margot & The Nuclear So & So’s, and it ended up kind of changing the way I think about songwriting. To this day I still think Richard Edwards is one of the best and most underrated songwriters around. It’s not my favorite album by them (that would be Slingshot To Heaven) but it is a formative album for me.

The Special Love I Have for You: Discovering Badfinger’s Straight Up

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 02:41:00 +0000

Would you lend a highly sought-after album to someone whose last name you didn’t know, had no clue where they lived, and might possibly never see again? That is how I was introduced to my all-time favorite album.

From before I started kindergarten, all I wanted to do was hang out in record stores or the next best thing: a department or discount store record section. My biggest summertime thrills were stumbling upon garage sales with stacks of 45s for a dime apiece. Three of my biggest childhood disappointments came from the closure of record stores at Village Square, a 1960s-era outdoor mall half a mile from my home in 1976, 1980, and 1983.

The Trick to Getting Into Trick of the Tail and Genesis

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 10:47:00 +0000

The Squonk is of a very retiring disposition and due to its ugliness, weeps constantly. It is easy prey for hunters who simply follow a tear-stained trail. When cornered it will dissolve itself into tears. True or False?

I first learned these words in late 1976, months after Trick of the Tail was released. I memorize them because Kevin’s older brother Sean told us to, and I wanted to impress Sean more than anything.

Talking to Anthony Kim

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 03:08:00 +0000

It’s really emotionally affecting for me in particular. It makes me think a lot about mortality. It makes me think a lot about the way that our memories work. It’s because the way it was recorded, where, basically he was destroying the tapes as he was looping them. It sort of makes me think about the way that our memories sort of crack and fade over time…

Q&A Remix With Mike Rastiello

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 04:35:00 +0000

The Q&A Remix is a frequent column on IHTOV in which people from all walks of life answer a set of pre-written questions about their vinyl collection. Today we welcome friend of the blog, Mike Rastiello

Have you ever bought a record just for the artwork?

Mending Wall by Angst. It was never available on streaming, and songs only popped up on YouTube years after I bought the album. It’s really good, and as it turns out they were a huge influence on Frank Black and the Pixies and are probably one of those “your favorite band’s favorite band.”

I Just Want to Sell Out My Funeral: How The Wonder Years Changed Pop Punk Forever

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 02:46:00 +0000

There are only so many hours in the day, and so little of it is spent listening to music. So, if you’re a music fan like me, when you find a band or album that speaks to you, you want to hold on to that for as long as you can. It acts as a testament to a time or period in your life, yelling at you through speakers as it softly spins on a turntable. A constant reminder that things aren’t as bad as you think, and music can help you explore facets of yourself while reaching out a hand of understanding.

Growing Up With the Beatles

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 07:14:00 +0000

I am nine years old. I wake up with the sound of “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” drifting into my room and I know. It’s Saturday and I’ve got chores to do. I think it’s my turn to vacuum and I sleepily head into the kitchen for some breakfast before I start my task. I eat through “Getting Better” and stare at the cereal box during “Fixing a Hole.” I know I have to get started if i don’t want to waste my morning inside. There are friends to see, bikes to ride, baseball cards to be traded. I trudge into the living room where my mother already has the vacuum out for me and my sister is dusting.

Q&A Remix With Matt Lavallee

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 02:26:00 +0000

The Q&A Remix is a frequent column on IHTOV in which people from all walks of life answer a set of pre-written questions about their vinyl collection. Today we welcome Matt Lavallee, a Massachusetts musician.

What are your first memories of listening to records?

One day when I was maybe ten or so my dad showed up with an old turntable and a couple LPs - namely Sound Effects Volume 1 on the Audio Fidelity label, and a copy of The Flying Platters. Who knows where these came from - they might have been sitting in the barn for a couple decades. Plugging it in, we found that the motor still worked, but it lacked a needle.

Three Services at the Church of In-store Play

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 03:10:00 +0000

Last summer I went record-store hopping with a musician I’d admired for more than a decade. In the car we chatted like we were instant old friends, but as soon as we got into a shop we’d split up, eventually drifting back toward the register, and comparing our hauls outside.

Maybe it’s because we’re both terminal introverts, but I think record shopping is solitary by nature, even when you’re with friends. Partly it’s physics; you can’t both look through the same bin at the same time unless you’re looking over someone’s shoulder. But I also think the rhythm of record browsing is deeply personal, maybe as individual as a fingerprint. How fast you flip through the bins, how long you pause for an artist or album you’ve never heard of before you flick past or pick it up to investigate further. With how much care do you slip a record from the sleeve, at what angle do you hold it to check for scratches? It’s intimate.

Bryan of Totally Real Records

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 03:08:00 +0000

Bryan joins us to talk a little about his record label, a little about working in a record store and a lot about a 1962 record he became fascinated with

“I don’t even remember if it was on a greatest hits collection, or if it was a seven inch, or what, but this one song, when I put the record on, was playing, and I was like, I love this, this is the most perfect sounding song I’ve ever heard.”

Q&A Remix With Bevan Bell

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 07:20:00 +0000

Have you ever bought a record just for the artwork?

I certainly have. The first one that comes to mind is a collection of TV Themes that had a three panel artwork of The Green Hornet, Tarzan, and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. The images were very much like quick turn comic book panels and not great, but something about it was very entertaining. I put it in a frame and it’s in my garage/office. Others would be these very 60s mod jazz albums and jazz compilations like Easy Jazz on a Fish Beat Bass.

Q&A Remix With...Me

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 19:00:00 +0000

The Q&A Remix is a recurring column under the new releases heading. I give people a list of 15 questions and they pick out the ones they want to answer. Thought I’d give it a go myself.

Have you ever bought a record just for the artwork?

Not the sleeve artwork, but the album artwork. In 1980, I bought True Colors by Split Enz which had designs and colors etched into the record itself. I believe that was a first, or at least the first I had seen anything like that. I had to have it.

Minor Threat, Nostalgia, and Teenage Rage

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 04:30:00 +0000

I touch the record and I am sixteen again, straight-edge more or less by default, sitting in my room listening to “Seeing Red” and thinking, yeah, these guys get it.

I don’t remember where I got my copy of Minor Threat’s Complete Discography CD, but it was in heavy rotation when I was in high school. I didn’t care that they had broken up two years before I was born, the raw youthful anger was enough to make a connection regardless of time and distance. As someone who also spent my teenage years not smoking (both of my grandfathers died of smoking-related illnesses)*, drinking (I had snuck a few sips of my dad’s Stag beers and didn’t really care for it) fucking (if anyone was interested in doing that with me when I was in high school, I was utterly oblivious) or doing drugs (I wouldn’t have had the first clue where or how to get drugs, even if I had any particular interest in using them), I identified with the ideas put forth in songs like “Straight Edge”, “In My Eyes”, and “Out of Step”, even if I didn’t really feel like I had the intent necessary to consider myself straight-edge; my sober state was more one borne out of inaction than of any militancy of belief.

Q&A Remix with Rosy Overdrive

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 10:21:00 +0000

What’s the most treasured album in your collection and why?

Just going off of how much I listen to it, I think it must be Pere Ubu’s Les Haricots Sont Pas Salé 1987-1991 box set. I love pretty much every era of Pere Ubu, but there’s something about listening to this one–their brief stint on a major label, where they genuinely did try to make pop albums–that feels very rewarding in record format. The three proper albums in it–The Tenement Year, Cloudland, and Worlds in Collision, are all distinct versions of pop music, but they’re all Pere Ubu, too. These records were reworked and resequenced to fit on vinyl, and I imagine people who heard the original versions of these albums might take issue with that, but they’re the versions I know the best and they’re right to me.

Katie McTigue of Pacing

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 03:15:00 +0000

Today we are talking to Katie McTigue of Pacing about putting out her Real Poetry album on vinyl

Poetry, Lyricism, and David Berman: a Mourner's Chronicle

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 05:30:00 +0000

I used to fancy myself a poet. I was in high school at the time and, spurred on by the words of my then idol Jim Morrison (i know, i know), I penned cryptic, dark, scattered poetry meant to be read by no one but myself. I was afraid to show anyone my oddly metered words, for fear they would at best ridicule them or, at worst, not understand them. There were few things worse to my teenage self than being misunderstood, and to have that done over poetry would wound me.

Poems, Lyrics, and The Mourning of David Berman

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 05:23:00 +0000

The Mystical Dice of Random Musical Destiny

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 02:58:00 +0000

I recently bought a new turntable. It is the first serious piece of audio equipment that I have purchased for myself in 22 years.

It is not as if I didn’t own a record player. The piece of equipment that I bought 22 years ago is, in fact, a working phonograph. But change is good and it was time for a change.

To celebrate this fun new record player, I’m going to return to enjoying regular audio adventures with my Mystical Dice of Random Musical Destiny.

Q&A Remix With Jack Probst

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 02:57:00 +0000

Today we welcome culture writer Jack Probst

Have you ever bought a record just for the artwork?

Heavens no. I made the mistake of buying a CD in high school based on the weird artwork, and it ended up being a Christian ska band. Never again.

What is your most memorable vinyl buying experience?

A buddy and I spent all day together traversing all the St. Louis record stores about ten years ago. I don’t remember what I purchased or anything we talked about, but the act of walking around a record store with a friend is what I hold dear. Record shopping can often be a quiet, solitary experience, but having a friend with you is rad. I love that feeling when you grab their attention from across the store to have them look at the cool things you’ve pulled out of the racks or you found something they’re looking for so they can both share the excitement.

Superdestroyer

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 02:35:00 +0000

You know, a lot of those are really beat up that I find though, I actually don’t buy them very often because they’re in bad condition. I bought a copy of Black Flag Damaged. Yeah, it sounds like shit. I would expect nothing less from a bunch of punks who probably played that vinyl to death.

Happiness I Cannot Feel: Black Sabbath's "Paranoid" and the Turmoil Within

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 12:21:00 +0000

I was eleven years old when I first heard Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid.”

I don’t think anyone intended for me to hear it. A well-meaning cousin bought me a compilation album called Superstars of the 70s. I think he wanted me to listen to certain tracks, help me discover the music he liked. The Beach Boys. The Doobie Brothers. Crosby Stills and Nash.

At first I gravitated toward the Yes cut, a three minute version of “Roundabout” (and I would only later discover there was another 536 minutes of the song). There was Hendrix and Deep Purple and various other hard rock songs — all edited down to a radio-friendly three minutes or so — that excited me as I worked my way through both sides of all four discs.

Q&A Remix With Miranda Reinert

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 01:27:00 +0000

Today we welcome Miranda Reinert, who is a writer and podcaster based in Chicago, Illinois. She graciously answered a dozen questions. Let’s dive in.

Have you ever bought a record just for the artwork?

I don’t know if it’s solely for the art, but I keep an eye on Landland Colportage’s website to see what they’re putting out because I love their art so much. I definitely own a lot of their releases I maybe wouldn’t have bought just because I think the way they do packaging is so special.

Everything in its Right Place

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 17:08:00 +0000

I was thirteen when I watched Neil Young and Pearl Jam perform ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ at the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards. I didn’t know it at the time, but the collaboration would eventually inform how I organized my record collection and how I thought about my favorite artists.

It was a big night. It may be shameful to admit now, but in 1993 the VMAs were the center of my calendar year. The annual awards show marked the end of summer, the start of the school year, and brought with it the promise of unpredictability and spectacle.

Marc Masters

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 15:59:00 +0000

I ordered one from them once and I opened it up in the post office, and all this dirt just came flooding out because it was packaged in a plastic sleeve with just dirt and hair, and it smelled really bad. Every record of theirs was this kind of weird, handmade thing, and I have them all.

Q&A Remix With Drew Beringer

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 16:09:00 +0000

Today’s Q&A Remix is with music writer Drew Beringer

Have you ever bought a record just for the artwork?

Not explicitly but if there’s an album that I just kind of like but the artwork (or variant) is fire I’ll pick it up.

What is your most memorable vinyl buying experience?

Going to Inner Sleeve Records in Wausau WI in the winter of 2015 - we found a sealed copy of the Sleater-Kinney box set in color.

Their Band Saved My Life: Double Nickles on the Dime, Mental Health, and My Punk Rock Salvation

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 15:05:00 +0000

I once let a kid who had been kicked out of his house live with me and my family, and he tried to steal my underwear. Okay, that’s a lot up front, let me backup for just a second. It will be quick, and then I’ll tell you how it all led me to The Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime and how D. Boon, Mike Watt, and George Hurley saved my life.

Arthur of phoneswithchords on Tom Petty's "Wildflowers"

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 14:57:00 +0000

My kids are in high school now, and being able to play specifically that song, “Wildflowers,” I played it for them and they really liked it. And then one of my one of my daughters drew some wildflowers. She framed it, and it says, you belong among the wildflowers. And she made these little drawings of flowers, sketched them and gave it to me, and so I’ve got it up on the wall. So, yeah, there’s a lot of connections.

Q&A Remix With Greg Katz of Cheekface

Wed, 25 Dec 2024 21:17:00 +0000

What is your most memorable vinyl buying experience?

My first vinyl purchase was going to Greene Records in Santa Ana California and picking up Jupiter by Cave In. Tiny mom-and-pop store specializing in punk records that no longer exists. It stays pretty memorable to me.

What’s the first area you head for in a record store?

First the main endcaps and displays. I like knowing what’s new, what the store is trying to sell, and what they’re proud to have. Then jazz, funk and soul, then new rock.

The Story of Hoodwax: A Monthly Vinyl Meetup

Wed, 25 Dec 2024 21:06:00 +0000

They say because we’re humans, we crave human connection. From social gatherings around the holidays to taking in a movie or concert with friends, our shared sense of joy is nourishment for the soul. As a capital “E” extrovert, I live this sentiment every day.

When my wife became pregnant with our son 10 years ago, we decided to sell our loft condo in Lowell, Mass., a former mill town located 30 minutes north of Boston, and move a little closer to my job. Sadly, I made the decision without thinking through the social implications of leaving a city where we had laid strong cultural roots over the course of our 8 years there.

A Walk With Foxing's Eric Hudson

Wed, 25 Dec 2024 19:37:00 +0000

I think it’s okay to hate something but I think what’s important is to remain curious about things that you don’t like and things that you hate, mainly because I think that you’re missing out on an opportunity to understand or learn something about yourself, or learn something about something you don’t understand. That could be really important, and I think it also helps you learn more about the things you do understand. I wish more people would do that.

Do You Feel Like We Do - a tale of Peter Frampton and friendship

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 08:00:00 +0000

I was reunited with some albums I parted ways with a long, long time ago when they somehow ended up in possession of my sister. I hadn’t seen them in years, but I thought of them often, wondering where those REM and U2 and XTC records went to. Little did I know they were residing in Rhode Island with my sister, who recently surprised me with a canvas bag filled with those albums.

Q&A Remix With Owen Brazas

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 18:19:00 +0000

Ever since Owen’s parents taught him how to flip a record as a child he has been hooked on vinyl. Never one to get into arguments about format; of what sounds the best, he just liked the way records sounded and the ritual of playing them. A Chicagoland native, Owen was lucky to have so many great record stores to visit and discover all sorts of cool sounds. Owen has been playing in bands since the 90s and is currently the guitar player of noisy rock band Weaklung, you can find him a few times a week browsing the bins at Reckless in The Loop on his lunch break.

In Defense of Sad Records: My Trip Down the Narrow Stairs

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 18:09:00 +0000

I first say “life sucks” and mean it when I’m twelve years old, in the late aughts. I’m too awkward for friends, social media is starting to expose me to the world’s biggest problems, all the adults are sad from the recession, and my own parents are fighting a long and bloody divorce. When I say it, I’m alone in my bedroom, and the silence thereafter feels like the universe agreeing with me.

Discovering the Dark Side of the Moon

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 17:33:00 +0000

It’s 4am and I am listening to Dark Side of the Moon. It’s Saturday; the world won’t wake for another couple of hours, so I keep the volume soft, as if it might wake the neighborhood. The lights are out and I am high. Conditions are perfect for a listen to this album.

I was eleven in March, 1973, when DSotM came out. Even though I was already dipping my feet into the rock pool thanks to older cousins who introduced me to Black Sabbath and The Who, I was not ready for Pink Floyd. I was not ready for this specific record. There was too much nuance, too much “weird stuff” as I put it back then. “Money” was all over the radio and I liked the song a lot, but I just didn’t want to labor through the whole album.

Mike Huguenor

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 16:58:00 +0000

“For a while, for many years of my life, I only knew There’s Nothing Wrong with Love. Because I was like, well, this record is amazing. I’m satisfied, and I’m going to listen to this for a long time, basically. And I did, and then it was only after a few years or so, I was like, okay, let’s, let’s add another into this. Because now I want more, and there’s more I can listen to, kind of and so it’s like allowing yourself a chance to continue to find stuff by someone you really love.”

Cloud Nothings - Turning On

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 20:52:00 +0000

By Trevor Zaple

Shopping for vinyl is a habit that, primarily, has you working like an old-timey prospector panning for gold in California in the middle of the 19th Century. Picture it: I’m deep in the musty innards of a vintage and antique mall in London, Ontario. Tucked away in the corner, near the washrooms, is a little nook that mostly sells old Coke signs, teacups, and commemorative plates. Hidden behind a shelf of dusty old tumblers in the corner – the very back corner of the mall – are records.

Letter From the Editor

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 21:10:00 +0000

Welcome to the inaugural edition of I Have That on Vinyl.

The greatest Christmas of my life happened in 1974. I was eleven years old and the euphoria I felt upon receiving my very own turntable was something that would be hard to replicate; all Christmases thereafter were ruined by the fact that I peaked at eleven.

Ode to K-Tel

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 21:04:00 +0000

There’s a picture of me, taken on Christmas morning. I’m about eleven years old and I’m holding two K-Tel records, beaming like I just received the greatest gifts ever. And in a way, I did. Those records were the gift of music. They gave me the ability to pour through a collection of songs to find something I liked without having to splurge all my saved allowance on a ten or twenty 45s.

Q&A With Josaleigh Pollett

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 20:54:00 +0000

Josaleigh Pollett makes tender and thoughtful DIY indie rock in Salt Lake City, UT. Their most recent album, “In The Garden, By The Weeds” came out in July of 2023 and is available all over the internet.

ABOUT IHTOV

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 01:12:00 -0500

A Little About IHTOV

Q&A Remix with Matthew Milligan from Wheatus

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 14:06:00 -0500

Matthew Milligan has been a professional musician since 2006, best known for his work with Wheatus (“Teenage Dirtbag”), Mike Doughty (Soul Coughing), MC Frontalot (Nerdcore Rising), and MC Lars (“Download This Song”). In various roles and on multiple instruments he has performed alongside Vernon Reid (Living Colour), Dan Wilson (Semisonic), Billy Martin (Medeski Martin & Wood), Wayne Kramer (MC5), Money Mark (Beastie Boys), Marc Ribot (Tom Waits), Josh Devine & Sandy Beales (One Direction), Bowling For Soup, Corn Mo, “Weird Al” Yankovic, Jean Grae, Mega Ran, Schaffer The Darklord & more. He is a writer / producer / founding member of NYC based groups Fashion Bird Danger Danger & Grim All Day, as well as long distance electronic collaboration Maeges. He hosts the “Weird Al-Gorithm” podcast on the Geekscape Network, and was invited to moderate a “Weird Al” themed panel at the 2024 San Diego Comic Con. On the technical side, he worked as an engineer on“Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast” from 2020 until Gilbert’s passing in 2022, and he mixed the Wheatus live album M (Live in America), first released in 2020. He worked at / managed the beloved vinyl record shop Permanent Records in Brooklyn, NY from 2009 until its closing in 2017.