Let the Record Show...

I remember when we were kids, a turntable seemed like a terrible luxury. After all, it was spending money on something that was already available for free - music. In a way, it's the same question that lingers, still, except that fifteen /twenty years ago, the vinyl scene was nowhere near as developed as it is now. Now, it's a full-blown hobby, and you can find records seemingly everywhere, but back then, it was fueled more by your favorite bands putting music out on vinyl as well as CD, and how impossibly cool it seemed.

It seemed to me you couldn't be a proper music lover without a turntable, so off I'd go whenever I was traveling, and admire all the beautiful turntables and records I found for sale in bookstores and second hands. Out of reach.

Until one sneaky Christmas morning when @graveyardpat decided to remind me just what a terrific brother he is. There's nothing quite like knowing you've found a properly good gift idea for somebody you love - it's hitting the lottery, and he was suitably pleased with himself. The idea had actually occurred to my little bro a few months back, while visiting one of our favorite places in London, Jack White's Third Man Records when he decided to take advantage of my disappearing into that beautiful blue basement to purchase this:

It's only a single, meaning there's one song on either side of the disc, but it's not picked at random. The title single is Hotel Yorba, a very special song to me, as Pat well knew. I always said, if I ever get married, this song would be playing in the background and my intended would - appropriately - be holding an umbrella. Plus, the B-side is the gorgeous, cheeky Rated X (a tad ironic, given it's about a divorced woman considered loose).

~Placebo's Meds

So my clever brother, who must've been around 15 at the time, snuck the disc back home, then did his homework and found me a decent turntable so that I could actually enjoy it (and his pick for the first proper record I should own, Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here).

I must admit I was a little down when I first received it. Much as I loved it, I thought my collection would never amount to much. Records are, after all, hella expensive. Still, I started chipping away at it. Soon after Christmas, I found on sale the one I consider to be the prettiest sleeve in the collection:

~Leonard Cohen's Songs from Another Room.

Then, I think I got new records for my birthday, another Pink Floyd from my best friend, and a Shinedown record from my brother. And so, the collection slowly grew. Over time. Eclectically. With no set pace, and no linearity.

It started blossoming all over the place. As a traveler, I had access not just to the (small-ish) selection in Bucharest, but to the entire European market. I've got in my collection records from all sorts of places - the UK, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Hungary, and of course, Romania. Hopefully, the collection will keep on growing.

One thing I certainly didn't realize when I first got the turntable was how much I would enjoy collecting them. I think there's a certain ponciness attached to the scene, a point of pride in knowing rare editions or spending absurd amounts of money. I try to avoid that. There are some finds I'm particularly proud of, however.

There's Pink Floyd's The Wall, which I snagged at a terribly good price, on account of the fourth side (it's a double-feature, of course), being a bit wonky. It doesn't really affect the enjoyment, and only gets craggly a tiny bit toward the very end, yet I managed to get a substantial discount. I was quite pleased.

I was also over the moon when I found this baby (also in London):

As far as I'm concerned, few voices are more resonant or memorable in the history of literature than Dylan's. When I dug this out of a mound of seeming nonsense and old, stale comedy, I was beyond thrilled, even though the sleeve is barely there, and I had no room for it in my backpack. Somehow, I managed to get this beauty safely back home (much to my neighbors' chagrin, considering Dylan's boomy resonance).

I guess I'm quite a methodical collector, even as I may not be a methodical person. I prefer sensible collections of the same artist over one-off finds, and worked quite a bit to bring together a suitable Jack White collection (together with my brother, so to be fair, it was a thing for us, not just for me). The fact that much of it is bought straight from the source, after or right before seeing that phenomenal man in concert, is nothing short of miraculous to me. What fucking luck.

They're also some of the cleverest records in my collection. For instance, Side A of Lazaretto plays backwards (the source of many a double-take over time), and even features a hidden angel if you shine your light on it at the right angle.

It's hard to say which is the prettiest disc in the collection, though it's probably down to these three:

Florence and the Machine's How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful (10th Anniversary Edition), Halestorm's The Strange Case Of... (special edition clear disk, as part of Atlantic Records' 75th Anniversary series), and Jack's Fear of the Dawn.

So, getting back to the question at hand, thoughtfully posed by @mipiano: Are vinyl records gaining popularity again, or are they interesting just for collectors?

I'd say there's definitely been an increased interest in collecting the stuff. Whether they're becoming more relevant in general, I don't know, but I do know there seem to be more and more collectors than before, so that's something. :)