I grew up with a boom box boasting three modes: cassette, compact disc, and radio. I used all three, listening to Harry Potter tapes and $3 CD singles and Rick Dee's Top 40. I mixed media too, recording my favorite songs onto cassette when they'd come on the radio. I loved how different the controls felt. Pushing the Play button on a tape was mechanical, the way it would lock down until the side ended when it would pop up with a click. Playing a CD was just a simple tap on a flat button, the sound of the laser sliding into place and the disc whirring beginning even before I'd moved my finger away. I changed the radio station by rolling a dial back and forth, trying to align the selection line with the markings on the wheel.It wasn't for a lack of playable media that I decided to bring my dad's old turntable out of its exile on a shelf in our library. In fact, I didn't own a single record, and all my parents had were the final edit of their LP collection from years before: their Beatles albums, some Elton John, and not much else. Wanting to use the turntable came from something else entirely, the hunger a lonely thirteen-year-old girl feels for authenticity.
So one night, I carried the old Sony turntable down the hall to my room, plugged it in, and set one of the old LP's onto the platter. I hit Power and then Start, and watched the tone arm rise from its corner and sluggishly hover its way to edge of the disc. The needle made contact. No sound came out. But then I could hear the music, faintly, like listening through a heavy door. Where was it coming from? I cocked my head, moved it closer and farther until I ascertained that the music issued from the point of contact between the needle and the record, like an infinitesimal finger strumming a tiny guitar.
By the end of that evening I'd co-opted my dad's receiver, uncovered the two little speakers stored in the highest cabinet in the family room, and culled from the record collection all those albums and 45's I deemed musically worthy. I had dozens of CD's, hundreds of mp3's, and scads of tapes (even in that latter day of 2004), but the turntable was special. The records were special.
I could stare at the needle skating across the disc for two sides and then some, awed into stillness by the way the album sang at the touch of the needle, no magnets or lasers, just a whisper resonating through a string into a tin can, really.
Every time I pack for a move, I wonder whether I should sell my record collection, pare it down like my parents pared down theirs twenty years ago, keep the LP's mostly for the beauty of their sleeves and the nostalgia of what they've meant to me over the years. But I don't. I even buy more, sometimes. Last year, I bought a media cabinet to keep them dust-free and vertical.
It's not that I don't keep up with music technology, either. I caved and bought an iPod five years ago, and my Spotify account has become my chief means of listening to music, quite often from my smartphone. But music for me is time and place and people, something fundamentally physical. The notion of analog wins me over. I can no more part ways with my albums than I can with the memory of how it was to see and hear at once the music that I so deeply felt.
The idea for this blog came to me while riding the bus to work, fresh off a Fiona Apple concert the night before, listening to Sharon Van Etten and thinking about how few female music critics there are and how few female musicians there are whose work is taken seriously. Pop might be dominated by Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Rihanna, but alternative and indie has always been a man's world, critics and creators alike. It occurred to me that I could throw my words into the ring. I've loved to write longer than I've loved music, but I've begun to tire of constantly writing with central focus on myself. The project invented itself in an instant.
Female musicians, female writer. Histories, legacies, anecdotes. Albums, tracks, artists. The experience of listening and resonating.
