Davis continues, “With vinyl you get two cracks at an opening track, two cracks at sequencing — a real art in and of itself. All that falls away with the CD, with a digital album.” And with the artwork, it turned out the 12″ diameter landed as the optimal size for records, but you end up with this perfect canvas for artwork. There are no back covers on any digital album artwork, never mind a gatefold.

So why now? Why might folks be appreciating these objects in increasing numbers of late?

Davis points to the pandemic creating the massive shift toward vinyl appreciation. With the loss of opportunity for live music, vinyl has a lack of portability with an emphasis on multilayered experience — no other format boasts a smell, a feel, a visual product, and of course a sound quite like listening to records. These merits were a perfect fit for bored, isolated people stuck at home craving a richer experience.

Vinyl is an act of reverence, a defiantly ritualistic time investment in a sea of ever-increasing convenience. Record listening is perhaps a pushback, similar to its relatives in the slow food, slow fashion, and mindfulness-practicing circles, a pushback to a society kneeling at the altar of faster-cheaper-more.

For Grimey’s, the sale of records online single-handedly saved their business during 2020. That, and a little boost from Tayor Swift. Shortly after the stay-at-home orders were enacted, Swift’s publicist called up Davis and offered to cover the healthcare costs of all of Grimey’s employees for three months, as well as bridge the store’s payroll costs until their unemployment assistance kicked in. When news of the superstar’s generosity hit mainstream press, Grimey’s immediately sold out — not out of their vinyl, however, but out of their store T-shirts.

This little anecdote comes as no surprise to Chris Black, culture writer, podcast host, and wise-cracking cynic. Black finds the whole record-connoisseur culture to be a sort of fetishization of nostalgia, and one perpetuated by false insistence on an audial sensitivity that few listeners actually possess. Black’s stance is that the claim that records sound better is nonsense, and that digital media has progressed — as have high-end CDs — to the point that few ears can actually tell the difference. Think wine drinkers who claim to taste the forest floor and chicory notes in their riesling because they paid $90 for the glass, when you could have served them “Two-Buck Chuck” and they’d be none the wiser.

Black’s dismissal of the merits of record culture are understandable in a youth culture that can be overly motivated by the posturing of cool rather than legitimate taste, perhaps captured in the zinger:

How many hipsters does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Oh, you don’t know?

“It’s not an excuse for personality. Being a vinyl guy is like saying I’m an IPA guy. I don’t care.”

To Black, this record renaissance is driven less by a hallowed musical format than by the power of music celebrity — and in turn music industry “fuckery,” i.e. the financially-driven decision to focus on vinyl as more of a merch asset (bundled with ticket and exclusive event sales, or as a limited-edition color). This feeds (and drives) a consumer need to own every object associated with a particular throned musician. (See: Dua Lipa, Billie Eilish, or Harry Styles.)

However, when speaking to Sean Rutkowski, VP of Independent Record Pressing, a mid-sized plant based in Bordentown, New Jersey, I gleaned a slightly different perspective. Rutkowski acknowledges 2020 threw vinyl into the limelight due to the closed loop of scarcity. He sees the push as having come from the musicians and their managers themselves, rather than the labels per se (and laments the nightmarish logistics of pressing a 20K vinyl run in 9 different colorways). He thinks the tipping point came when the big-box retailers got on board (Target, Whole Foods-Amazon); and then the demand could not possibly be met by production, which has simply poured kerosene on the demand itself.

Rutkowski also differentiates slightly in the experience of listening: “Sure, records sound better — but they sound better because you’re paying attention. And attention is what drives record sales.” He points out that music now inundates us everywhere, at all times; in fact, we have become conditioned neurologically to block it out. But listening to records is an act of defiance to our oversaturated ears.

He further makes a case for music being tied to memory, and how powerfully and swiftly music can catapult us to specific moments in time. Pulling up digital tracks can theoretically access this same recall process, but the way in which people interface with digital music is so different — jumping around from song to song. Playlists have overtaken album sequences, and this matter of focus and attention in the listener has shifted.

I can attest to the analog/digital music divide. I live with two musical tyrants, ages 7 and 9, who battle over command of the living room Alexa, alternatingly barking out their disjointed hitlist — BTS to Demi Lovato to Skillet to Sia (frequently over and over, and yes, over again). This is our unwitting parental soundtrack for the last number of years.

It just so happened that my research for this piece dovetailed with a family digital detox — mainly removing recreational screens from play for a month. With all this spare time on their hands, the kids were more interested in pouring through some of the thousand or so records in their dad’s collection (yes, I married a DJ, but don’t hold that against him).

Immediately, it was easier to engage the kids in the science of the technology: RPMs are visible, the science of sound. “The grooves are actual sound waves, the player amplifies sound waves — it’s alive!” This was more exciting to them than I might have forecasted. The mythology of crate digging, the art of discovery, the anticipation and uncertainty of purchasing something before knowing what it sounds like — this process was fascinating and bewildering to them, as though I’d suggested we start force-feeding them mysterious, exotic dinners blindfolded.

We played the noise record their dad had played drums on, which my son deemed creepy. “It’s got a darker tone,” said my daughter (unprompted). She is a musician. I didn’t tell her Chris Black says she’s lying.

“It’s cool that not everyone can listen to any of this at the same time as you,” chimed in my son (scarcity!). “But what’s that smell?” “That’s the smell of decay, son,” I answered.

They got a kick out of asking their dad how much he paid for a rare Television 45 RPM (25¢), and then begged me to look up the value of the record today ($48 on eBay). And we caught a deep groove to “Cissy Strut” by The Meters, where my daughter spontaneously picked up a harmonica and started dancing and accompanying the track. She’d never done that with a digital tune. Lastly, we listened to the recorded story (with accompanying book) of “The Wizard of Oz,” and I’m fairly certain my husband wept. We were happier than we’d been in months.

Ultimately, vinyl is about attention, limits, and being present in time: all principles that are diminished, if not fully banished, by the digital age. If you’re wondering how kids handle the absence of these phenomena, I invite you to teleport to my home the night before we started our digital detox. Spoiler: Everyone is crying and I’ve invited my therapist to move into the guest room.

Listening to records isn’t a wholesale solution, but if I could bottle the vibe of that evening in our living room, with vinyl blanketing the floor … well, I wouldn’t trade it for all the cute DJs of my youth, combined.