he sleeps in a room overflowing with vinyl
words & visuals by abby
☆
He always listens to entire albums.
In the age of Spotify and track selection, double clicks to skip and carefully curated playlists, he insists on playing out entire albums. You read a book from cover to cover, right? Why don’t we do the same with albums?
He owns four record players and eight hundred and twelve records. No, really. He counted them. Often. He had this one record player on a long side table in his room, a huge stereo combination thing, made of raw wood and burnished gold steel. He’d thumb through crates of records, select one and shake the vinyl disc from its sleeve. Slide the plastic lid up, fit the record to the player with his fingertips. Drop the needle. He could have pressed start. But he always dropped the needle himself.
We’d lie on the floor, heads at each others feet, and listen to entire albums. Sometimes obscure artists he picked out of record store booths, but more often than not Pink Floyd. He loves Pink Floyd. He could talk for hours about guitar riffs and the shift between a song, the notes melding and dissolving.
It’s a complete story, right? The first track to the second to the third to the last to the first.
He wears button-ups and smokes a lot of weed and talks about 60s bands the way girls want to be talked about, long fingers always wrapped around a skateboard or a beer. He doesn’t understand shades of grey. He sleeps in a room overflowing with vinyl and refuses to listen to any music recorded within the last two decades. He can’t stand pop culture. He flips through biographies of lives from the 70s and reads me Patti Smith quotes.
“He wears button-ups and smokes a lot of weed and talks about 60s bands
the way girls want to be talked about. He doesn’t understand shades of grey.
He sleeps in a room overflowing with vinyl & reads me Patti Smith quotes.”
Born in the wrong decade, he mumbles, a half smile betraying his realization of the cliché. He hates digital music. He needs to see it, hold it, feel it. It’s not real, he repeats, when I turn up at his door with headphones in. Music’s meant to be an experience. That’s just airwaves and vibrations and shit.
He fell in love with a girl called Emily who decided four months later it wasn’t working out. He took shrooms on a Tuesday morning and sat in English class as a quiet certainty dawned on him. He went home that afternoon and tried to kill himself.
He tries to explain his mind to me over a phone call. Love’s not even real, right? It’s all just chemicals in the brain. It just sucks, man, he says, with the brutal honesty of a seventeen year old boy. I ask him to do something he loves. Go for a skate. Meet a mate. Play a record. He shifts over on his bed, and I imagine him looking out the window by his record player, the lights of suburbia just visible in the distance.
Sometimes I feel like – like everything I love is dead. Like everything surrounding me is so old. Bands I’ll never meet and art I’ll never see.
He’s obsessed with tangibility, but I feel like a whole generation is passing him by. The first notes of Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd echo across the tinny phone line, and I look up at the ceiling and I imagine, an hour away, he does too.