Held on the edges, the platter is gently dropped on the turntable. The needle is lowered onto the vinyl and the hair goes up on the back of the neck. A warm blanket of music wraps itself around the listener.
Perhaps more than any other form of recorded music, listening to vinyl is a participatory experience. From the stunning visuals of the poster-sized record sleeves to the feel of the edge of the vinyl on your fingers, to even its unique warmth and nostalgia-inducing fragrance, there is something truly magical about vinyl.
Not to mention entering a record store is like joining a secret club. There’s a camaraderie there: Even if ones musical tastes are different than the owner or the other patrons, there is a mutual love of music — and a common emotional commitment to music that one just can’t get from streaming music from Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music or anywhere else.
In other places, waxing poetic or riffing about one’s favorite music might get blank stares or polite nods. In a record store, that can turn into discussions or meetings of the mind. It can lead to magical new auditory discoveries. There’s almost a tribalism that sets in: These people “get it.” And while the music they feel may be different than the music you feel, you know they experience music on that similar deeper level that you experience it at.
When you add to it the dopamine-triggering feel of finding that hard-to-track-down album you’ve been looking for, or for hearing a “new” song for the first time and falling in love with it, or tripping over your own feet as you fall down the rabbit hole of a newly discovered band or even genre, there is something truly magical about vinyl.
And much like music is the sound of feelings whose names haven’t yet been invented, the experience of vinyl isn’t something words do justice to. There are those for which the penny has dropped, those where it hasn’t, and then there are those who merely hear music and have never (and may never) truly feel it.
If music is what feelings sound like, vinyl is the key to feeling the music. What are you waiting for? Drop the needle already!
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