Sorting Records

After five moves in five years, Luke Ferris is finally unpacking the last of his boxes—the ones that contain his most precious cargo: his record collection. In this essay episode, we explore the strange power of things that finally make us feel at home.

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Sources for this episode:

• Royalty-free music and sound effects via Artlist.com
• HIGH FIDELITY Rob Re-Organizes His LPs
• These Things Matter
• Drinking Buddies - Official Trailer

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hello friends. Can you hear that? Can you hear that right now? It's one of those gray moist people hate that word. Damp. That's better. Spring mornings here. And before I dive into the episode, I just wanted to say, welcome. There's something about the spring rain that gives you comfort. Gets you in a cozy mood. I've got my coffee here. So curl up. Grab a hot cup of something. Listen to the bitter patter of the rain. Feel the earth begin to awaken. And hey, maybe you can use this rainy day to do something fun. Watch a movie. Or do something you've put off. Maybe something like sorting records. I've been having these strange dreams lately. I'm moving. Moving from a place. An apartment, a house, it's it's all ambiguous as dreams are. The walls are crumbling, the pipes are bursting with water, and I'm packing boxes. Now I'm not one of those dream journal people. I mainly think dreaming is just our brain processing information in low power mode, like a mental liver. Losing yourself in analyzing your dreams, I think, is a bit of a rabbit hole. Or should I say, inception. However, the recurrence of these moving dreams can't be a coincidence. I've moved five times in the past five years, and I'm sure there are many of you out there, by choice or by pressure, have had to do the same. But after moving into my new home, the rhythms of annual leases, apartment shopping, and Zillow hunting has been substituted by a quiet piece. Recently, I finally unpacked the last boxes of things that had been lost to storage. My record collection. No, no surprise this year for regular listeners and fans of Least Important Things that I have a record collection. I mean, it's just in my exact demographic of being a millennial dude who has a podcast that I would actually have vinyl in my household. Yes, sometimes it does feel good to live up to the stereotype. But before it was cool, then uncool to have records and a turntable. Records were all you had to listen to your favorite music, and part of the rhythms of owning these treasures of sounds was sorting them. For younger listeners, this may sound absurdly boring, but when you spend 20 to 30 bucks on a physical record as the only way you could listen to your favorite band or musician's album outside of one-track hits on the radio, your record collection was precious cargo. Imagine if every one of your Spotify favorited songs was packaged in a sleeve and you had to physically place them on a device instead of scrolling and tapping. Now imagine if how you handled and cared for those physical songs actually affected the audio quality. The last thing you would think about when you press play on Spotify is whether a track is going to skip. With that context, sure, you treat those Spotify songs with a little bit more delicacy. So that's why sorting records was a thing. The care and maintenance of these pieces mattered to the sound experience. Plus, how you organized, displayed, and categorized your records said something about who you were as a person. This is most famously canonized in the 2000 adaptation of High Fidelity, starring John Cusack. I guess it looks as if you're reorganizing your records. Nope. Autobiographical. So after months of not seeing my records, moving multiple times, and finally settling into a home, a spur-of-the-moment bookshelf purchase at World Market on a Saturday morning allowed me to finally unpack and display my records. I fixed myself a Negroni and set to work unpacking, cleaning, and displaying my records on our new shelf. I decided to sort them by genre-ish. First was the modern ladies of rock and indie rock. Then modern folk, then modern rock, then the crooners, classical music, soundtracks, and then miscellaneous. It all made sense in my brain. I leaned all of these categories of records along the wall and delicately placed them on the shelf. Each sleeve was a memory of a time, a place, and a record store I purchased them from. Walking into a new record store and leaving with three discoveries. A Christmas gift from a loved one. Our favorite album of 2023. The records we played over and over again during the pandemic. The first one I bought when I was living in North Carolina. The last one I bought while living in Chicago. These are the memories, stories, and emotional experiences of sorting through a record collection. And as pretentious as John Cusack's character Rob sounds, this stuff means something. Books, records, films, these things matter. Call me shallow. It's the fing truth. The last record I bought in Chicago when I was living there was at Terror Vision, a pop-up shop in Lakeview, started by director Ryan Grayfist, who directed one of my favorite movies, one of my wife's favorite movies, called Drinking Buddies. Absolutely ludicrous if you've done that in Chicago. This 24-hour montage of hell encapsulates all the worst parts of moving in Chicago or really anywhere. And trust me, they've happened all to me, except getting into a fistbite with a guy because I double parked a U-Haul. As I finally sorted my record collection, I noticed that the drinking buddy soundtrack laid unopened, with masking takeover the plastic film layer with a sharpie written note, Luke Ferris paid for. I held it at the shop because I knew there were few pressings of this soundtrack available anywhere. I think the guy working there said that Ryan actually had those in his basement and just brought them to the shop. This record was sacred to me. Yet it had remained unopened for months. I took a breath, I broke the thin seal and played the first track of the record. As I sat on the couch, looking at my display of freshly sorted records, I sipped my drink and then started to cry. All these emotions flooded to my body. Relief, sadness, pride, and peace. Sorting my records and displaying them was the final symbol of the transition in my life after months and months and months of unknowns. There's a quote by Shun Myu Masuno in The Art of Simple Living that I think resonates with this idea of sorting your records. Quote: Consider the things that surround you. Develop an appreciation for them. There is something specific that connects you with them, a reason why you acquired them. Take good care of them. Treat them like they are the best things. You will feel good about the time spent with them. Think about the connection between people and things. Treat them both well as you would yourself. That's what this is all about. As I sat back and looked at this beautiful record collection, the sleeves, the colors, the liner notes. It's less about even the music that comes out of these pieces of vinyl. It's more about how the physical item draws me back to memories, draws me back to moments, and how the pride of a silly collection can bring back emotions, can spur up new emotions, can create a pride in yourself and a feeling of completion. So the next time you're walking by your bookshelf, you're walking near a storage unit, you're thinking about those things trapped in your basement in a box, why not pull them out? Why not sort through them? Why not look at them, feel them, touch them, reorganize them? Because these things that we hold on to, these works of art or memories, are the reason why we can go backwards in times, forwards in time, but most importantly, be present in the moment with our things. Least Important Things is a podcast about movies, friendship, and finding meaning in the most important of the least important things. It's hosted and created by me, Luke Ferris. You can connect with us on social media, those are in the show notes, and you can subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts. If it's your first time joining us, welcome. We have a Patreon at patreon.com/slash least important things where you can become a free or paid member and help support the show and get access to exclusive content, alerts when new episodes come out. And if you become a friend of the show or paid level for the same price as a cup of coffee or a pint, you get a least important thing sticker, a special note for me, and more special surprises to come. Your support on Patreon, whether free or paid, helps us make more episodes like this one. So please, if you can do anything, if you enjoyed the episode today, head on over to patreon.comslash least important things and become a member. And I'll talk to you next time on least important things.