Dusty LPs

My record collection probably tells the story of my life better than I could in words.

Colleen Murphy

My LPs are everything to me. They occupy a corner of my room, a box which is filled to the brim with music and life. My mahogany record player sits on top of them, the volume nob continuously at the highest volume. To many, this seems like an idiotic thing to be sentimental about. We have CDs! Without feedback! Streaming lets you put all your favorite songs, in any order, on that little square of light we call a cell phone!

In short, I’ve been told that records are practically obsolete.

For someone who is currently listening to Paul Simon’s Graceland at a very loud volume, this statement is completely untrue. In fact, it’s this record that brought me back to my vinyls after a long sabbatical.

When I was 14 or so, a group of friends bought me a record player for my birthday. They knew (possibly from the numerous pictures of the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel that were stuck up in my relatively cramped high school locker) that I was mad about the music of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s – I had hoarded my dad’s Beatles and Who records for years, without the possibility of playing them unless I took them to my grandmother’s. That mahogany box changed everything, and helped to mold me into the crazy, sudo-hipster, wrongly-placed-in-this-generation person I am today, aged 18. Precarious and potentially pretentious as it seemed (certainly to my high school peers, who also loved the fact that I do much of my writing on a typewriter), I loved – love – the imperfections that come with playing music on a record player – the intermittent crackling between songs, the uneven mixture of instruments and voice. Even the potential that a speck of dust could float onto the surface and cause the old adage “repeating yourself like a broken record” to become reality. It’s odd, but I actually relish that – hearing the words “losing love is like a window in your heart” over and over again for a few seconds helped me relish and understand those words, and years later they mean more to me than I could have imagined.

And, let’s face it, it’s not just records. I absolutely adore my tape of Simon and Garfunkel’s sublime Central Park Concert of 1981. In fact, I have it on LP as well! Needless to say, the imperfections of the LP and the tape actually make the recording better, and here’s why:

One of the beautiful things about the Central Park Concert, for me at least, is the fact that Simon and Garfunkel made mistakes. Take The Boxer for instance – Garfunkel starts the second line too early, and in the video recording the two men look at each other and laugh. Their music is about the human experience, and that mistake just enhanced that. The record, too, enhances that: the cheering of the audience, the crackling, the air of that summer night comes through the embedded lines of the vinyl. If you close your eyes listening to that record, as I have done on countless occasions, you are there, you are in Central Park. You can feel the heat of the people around you as they embrace the music, you can feel the chill of the Manhattan summer night as the sun loses itself over the horizon. You laugh at their jokes, you cheer, you listen. Such an experience is unparalleled in the recorded perfection we strive for today.

Don’t write off vinyls. They may get scratched, they may be a little fiddly, but when you get it right, they are ethereal and wonderful and perfectly imperfect.