Comfort Albums and Mashed Potatoes

by editor Michele Catalano

One night when I was a teenager, my mother dropped her favorite mashed potato bowl on the floor. It shattered into dozens of pieces and, as shards of glass went skittering across the kitchen, she started crying and said, “We can never have mashed potatoes again!” My first reaction was to laugh at such a ridiculous sentiment. My next thought was to wonder, out loud, why she was crying. Mom left the room, Dad cleaned up the mess, and I thought about the horrors of never having mashed potatoes again.

It wasn’t until I was a mother myself that I understood why she was crying. Mothering three girls is hard. With two teenagers and a grade-schooler to contend with, she had her hands full. This was the late ‘70s. Women stayed home. Women kept the house clean and cooked roasts (I honestly don’t think my mother ever cooked a roast), and chauffeured the kids and handled doctors appointments and teacher meetings. Dad worked two jobs, so it was up to Mom to do it all. At the moment when she dropped the mashed potato bowl, she was probably exhausted, maybe even frustrated that one of us got in trouble at school or broke a rule she’d have to tell my father about. When the bowl hit the ground, so did her ability to cope. So she cried and felt sorry for herself because her teenage daughters only thought to laugh.

It was a Pyrex bowl with images of farmers going around it. It was pale blue and we did, indeed, always have our mashed potatoes served in it. My God, did we love our mom’s mashed potatoes. We didn’t have them often, because no one likes to peel an entire bag of potatoes, but when we did it was a reason for celebration. Eating them made me feel comforted and loved. And just as the potatoes were a comfort food for me, that bowl was a comfort to my mother. No wonder she didn’t want to make mashed potatoes anymore.

I think about my comfort items, the things that make me feel homey and warm and loved. Most of those comforts are centered around food: my father’s chili on a snow day, a big bowl of spaghetti and meatballs with homemade gravy (not sauce) on a Sunday, grilled cheese on a sick day. But there are also things that bring me comfort. I can’t imagine drinking my morning coffee out of anything but my schnauzer mug, or sleeping without the incredibly soft blanket that friends bought me when I was in the hospital. 

But mostly when I need comfort I put on a record—Aztec Camera’s High Land, Hard Rain comes to mind—and turn it up, letting it loose in my living room to envelop me in its arms, to make me think of those heady winter days when I fell in love in a record store, when I felt cherished and appreciated by someone. I imagine any of those comforts being taken from me, and I understand my mother with so much more clarity.

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. I look at my comfort albums the same way. They are not just things to listen to when I need comfort. They need to be handled, looked at, turned over in my hands. I need to examine the covers and read the liner notes and lyrics. When I am looking for comfort through music, streaming won’t do. I need my records.

Manchester Orchestra’s  Simple Math. R.E.M.’s Murmur. the Cars debut. Jeff Rosenstock’s We Cool? These are all records that mean the world to me, that I take out when life is crushing me and I need the comfort and care that only listening to a full physical album can afford me. I take each record out of its sleeve and hold it between my palms for a minute, savoring the physicality of it. I inhale, especially with Aztec Camera, R.E.M., the Cars, which all still have that vague record-store smell. In these moments, I can’t imagine listening to them any other way, because holding them and smelling them and putting the needle down are part of the comfort I’m seeking. Just as my mother couldn’t imagine eating mashed potatoes out of any other bowl, I can’t imagine listening to these records any other way during times of needed comfort. Duran Duran’s Rio won’t have the same effect listening to on streaming as it does when I take the vinyl out of its battered sleeve and drop it on the turntable. 

This is what adulthood is, really. Understanding more each year about your parents, about the way you were raised, about what they handed down to you, purposefully or not. I look back on my teen years and feel bad about what I put my parents through while I ran amok. Even into my twenties and thirties and beyond, I gave them reason to worry, to be anxious about me. As I raised my own kids into adulthood, not only was I getting payback for everything I did to my mother and father, but I was learning that valuable lesson most of us get as we age: my parents were right. About everything.

Once in a while, when I am feeling bummed out, I walk across the street to my parents’ house and just hang out in the backyard with them for a little while. Sometimes there will be pie and coffee. Sometimes they will invite me to dinner and there will be mashed potatoes. Mom serves them in an unbreakable yellow bowl. They always taste great, but they just don’t feel the same.

Michele Catalano is the founder and owner of I Have That on Vinyl. She would love it if you joined the Patreon - the home of the IHTOV community.