For the Love of Vinyl

By the looks of this blog, you might think we over here at Alstin eat, breathe and sleep all that is recruitment and retention. Every so often we’ll stray from the HR talk and bring you more on some of our favorite things, places and activities that also populate our daily lives.

Long before I could download a song for $.99, I would get my cheap thrills in the dollar bins. Still a favorite weekend pastime of mine, spending a Sunday afternoon flip, flip, flipping through bin after bin of vinyl records, each for $1, never fails to deliver.

I’ve bought albums for the sheer nostalgia of having owned the same record in my youth, the love of a particular song (It’s only a buck!) and even for crazy cover art that is either way cool, or just flat out hilarious. But most of all, I still buy a ton of music on vinyl for the joy of bringing home good tunes, unwrapping the plastic, firing up the hi-fi and letting it spin. Some vinyl lovers, my husband included, also like to claim that records just sound warmer.

I’ve never counted how many records I have amassed over the years, but a good guestimate is in the 1,000’s. Not all of them picked up at the bargain bin rate and not all of them used lost treasures.

Answers to FAQs: Yes, you can still get new music on vinyl Yes, there are a lot of other people like me who also buy music on vinyl. Yes, there are actual stores that still sell them, new and used. (My regular haunt is Princeton Record Exchange.)

If you have ever seen the movie High Fidelity, or read the book by Nick Hornby, you get a pretty good glimmer of what it’s like to have a wee bit of an addition to collecting vinyl. The scene where Rob Gordon, played by John Cusak, rearranges his records based on his autobiographical moments really slayed me when I first saw it. Still does. I relate. I’ve conducted bizarre personal sorting and arranging of my records too.

When I am making a pasta dinner I like to play a little gem I found called Mandlino Italino. I spin Irish folk music on St. Patrick’s Day and on the first real blustery fall afternoon you can bet that Vivaldi’s Four Seasons will be blaring out of my speakers. I even have a record put out by one of the Mummer String Bands that I pop on while making breakfast every New Year’s Day … “Oh ‘Dem Golden Slippers”. Life always needs a little background music.

One of the wackiest albums I have ever come across I don’t (yet) own. It remains at the DeHaven homestead and was purchased, oh I guess sometime in the 50’s or 60′s by my father, a lover of the automobile and a former racecar driver. It’s of the Indianapolis 500. It’s just the sounds of the racecars going around and around the track. Over and over. It is totally insane. He won’t part with it, which I tell him is also totally insane because there isn’t even a turntable in my parent’s house anymore. But I get it.

I had to squirrel away my turntable this past year from a pair of very grabby toddler hands. Now that the grabby phase seems to be fading alway, I was beyond happy to bring it back into the living room full time this past weekend as we decked the halls. In our house, setting up the Christmas tree just isn’t the same without a rendition of Jingle Bells by Old Blue Eyes himself, Frank Sinatra.

For the first album of the day however, I gave the honors over to my little guy. After flip, flip, flipping through a row of albums, he recognized the cover art from a corresponding CD he knows and loves and made his request: The Best of Leonard Cohen. It was a proud-shared moment for us parents – our kid likes good music!! And you know what, Leonard’s voice and his music really did sound warmer than our CD.