Trevor Alyn

Friday, May 8, 2026

Vinyl

A while back I wanted to give a copy of Joe Henry's album "Scar" to a friend. It deserves dedicated listening time, so I wanted to give it to him on vinyl, so that he would have to sit down and listen to the whole thing. For some reason I was tickled by the idea that he would have to get up and turn the record over to hear the other side.

What I didn't want to do is send him some kind of digital version. Because when you're listening to a streaming service, you're usually doing something else at the same time, so you don't really listen. And I wanted it to be a gift, not just a Spotify URL sent via text. But the album wasn't available on vinyl, and I don't think he has a CD player or a tape player. So despite my best intentions, it ended up being a Spotify URL sent by text.

It got me to thinking about what buying music used to be like. You went to a record store, and flipped through the records in their big waist-high racks, looking for the one you wanted. Sometimes someone at the store put on something amazing, and you ended up buying that instead (which is how I got into Peter Gabriel). Then you took the record home, and tore off the plastic wrapper, and spent a bit of time appreciating the album cover, which was 12 inches square and had enough room for all kinds of crazy details. Then you took the inner sleeve out of the jacket, and took the album out of the inner sleeve, and put on Side 1, and sat there and listened to it. When it was done, you got up and turned it over and played Side 2. (I had a bad habit of falling in love with one side of a record and never listening to the other side. To this day, there are albums where I know the first six songs by heart, but have almost no memory of the rest.)

Many artists took advantage of the necessity of splitting an album into two sides by having a different theme for each side. David Bowie's "Low" had an instrumental side and a side with lyrics. Instead of Side 1 and Side 2, Queen II had "Side White" and "Side Black." Noodly progressive bands might fill an entire side with one song.

(Side trip: Double albums had a convention where the first album had Side 1 and Side 3, and the second album had Side 2 and Side 4. This allowed you to listen to sides 1 and 2 back-to-back without getting up; you would stack both records on the spindle, and after side 1 was done playing, the second record would automatically drop and start playing.)

Then CDs came along, and the concept of the "side" disappeared. At the same time, the big gorgeous cover artwork was shrunk down from 12x12 inches to less than 5x5 inches. But at least they still had liner notes.

Remember liner notes?

If you don't know, liner notes were notes about a vinyl album that were printed on the inside sleeve of the album jacket, or on the album jacket itself. They might contain printed lyrics, words from the artist, notes about the production of the album, and so forth. It might be Tom Scholz of Boston enthusing you to "Listen to the record!" or Jeff Lynne of ELO telling you what an amazing artist he is ("Some of these songs are so over the top it’s amazing"), or Jethro Tull including a twelve-page parody of a small-town English newspaper.

Sometimes liner notes included additional artwork. Led Zeppelin's "In Through the Out Door" (which had six different album covers, and you couldn't tell which one you were getting because the album jacket was covered with a stamped paper bag) had a liner with two black-and-white photos that would display in color if you brushed them with water.

Listening to music is far easier now than it used to be. Instead of being limited to your record collection and whatever's on the radio, you can listen to anything you want, any time you want, anywhere you happen to be. Album art is still around, but it's displayed on a very small screen and hard to properly see (imagine trying to appreciate Santana's "Abraxas" or the cover of "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" on the screen of a phone).

The difference between then and now is especially clear if you think about 45s. These were little seven-inch vinyl records with a hit song on one side and a non-hit song by the same artist on the other side. Instead of playing at 33rpm, like 12" records, they played at 45rpm. The increase in speed allowed the vinyl to support higher-fidelity audio. If you liked a song on the radio, you could buy it on a 45 and listen to it as much as you wanted. But it was basically just one song. These days, the idea of going to that much trouble to acquire and listen to one song seems ridiculous.

I used to have a decent-sized record collection, but it became useless once I left home and started my adult life. I moved a lot, and the collection was too big to move. CDs and tapes, and eventually my iPod, were much more portable.

During a decluttering binge about five years ago, I got rid of almost all of my records, except for the ones that were not replaceable (and a few favorites). I can't say I regret it, because I like the convenience of having all of my music on an MP3 player, and because I can't tell the difference in sound quality between vinyl and digital, and because we don't have a ton of space.

But damn, I wish I could've given my friend a copy of that Joe Henry album...