The record waited. Nothing else does anymore.
Chris Kremidas-Courtney
This morning, I woke up and put on a Stone Roses record.
I pulled it from the record case and carefully pulled it from its sleeve. Then I held it by the edges and placed it on the turntable. I lowered the needle slowly and the music began. About twenty lush minutes later, Side A reached the end and the room went quiet.
Then I got up, walked across the room, and turned it over to Side B. It struck me that I was making a conscious choice to keep listening.
People have many explanations for why vinyl records feel different. The sound is warmer and album artwork moves us. There are liner notes to read, and they even sometimes included hidden messages we used to argue about with our friends. But I think there is something more going on since playing a record requires intention.
The record sits there until you decide to play it. Your decision then becomes a series of actions. Your thoughts and emotions choose the music and then your body carries this intention out into the world.
Then the record asks you to do it again. One side ends and the silence leaves you with a choice. You can turn it over, put on something else, or let the room go quiet while you listen to the echoes of the last song. The next thing that happens depends on you.
The same thing happens with a musical instrument. It can’t make any sound without you.
We experience agency through thousands of small choices like these. We decide what to cook, whom to call, which book to pick up or which song to hear. We form intentions and then act upon the world to make them real.
Many of technologies used to require these small decisions and acts as part of using them. Cassette tapes certainly did, especially when you made a mixtape.
Anyone who made mixtapes remembers the effort and intention that went into making them. You had 60 or 90 minutes divided between two sides. Every song took up some part of that finite space, so you made careful choices about each track and the order it went in. Sometimes you had only 2:32 left on one side of the tape and had to decide if you should leave it empty or find a short song that fit. Or perhaps you reordered the whole sequence after already spending hours making it.
And when you were making that mixtape for someone else, it went to a whole new level.
A mixtape could contain a massive bouquet of feelings that maybe you couldn’t put into words (or were too shy to do so). These were the songs you wanted someone to hear, arranged in a certain order which had its own meaning too. The music could say something you couldn’t quite say yourself or they carried a memory you and that person shared.
Then all those intentions of yours became physical actions. You found the songs and recorded them (sometimes from the radio) and wrote their titles on the little J-shaped card. You put it all into the case and handed it someone…then waited for them to experience it.
Your thoughts and feelings were turned into something physical that you could give as a gift. Your intentions had taken on form.
While not as intimate nor requiring the same time commitment to make, mix CDs had a similar quality in the early digital age. You still chose the songs and put them into a certain order, but you no longer had to listen along to each song as you compiled it. A CD gives you around 80 minutes, so you still had to make choices about timing, but now there was no stopping point halfway through like with a cassette tape. Instead of liner notes, the songs or bands would be handwritten on the disc with a Sharpie.
My brother in Chicago, who knew I was missing out on a lot of new alternative music over in Europe, used to mail me envelopes of 5-6 mix CDs at a time. He wanted me to learn about and enjoy the bands he was seeing onstage like Skinny Puppy or They Might Be Giants. I still have those CDs today and they continue to hold a lot of meaning for me.
That stayed with me because the feeling I get from vinyl or CDs feels connected to something beyond music.
Over the past few decades, we’ve become very good at shortening the distance between wanting something and having it. We can access a new song in seconds, even giving it a bit of a listen before we buy it. This is far different from the days of buying a record having heard maybe one song on the radio or at a friend’s house. You had no idea if you were going to like the rest of it and could be left feeling incredibly disappointed because it cost you all the money you had that week.
The same thing happens now with films and TV shows. Online shops keep an eye on us, remembering what we bought before and suggesting what we may want next. Meanwhile, online streaming services start another episode before we’ve decided whether we want to watch one or not. And streaming music can continue long after the album we originally chose has finished. The choice we face instead is to turn it off.
Convenience is one of the great achievements of modern technology and. having so much recorded music in my pocket still feels like some wonderful form of sorcery.
But every time technology anticipates and serves up the next song or movie, another small opportunity to exercise our own agency disappears.
It’s one less button to press and one less decision to make. So many of our experiences now just continue instead of being something we’re actively choosing.
The more I think about it, it’s a question of living intentionally.
In Walden, Thoreau went to the woods because he “wished to live deliberately.” Of course, his experiment was more ambitious than putting a Sisters of Mercy record on a turntable, but the idea is the same. Deliberate living begins by paying attention to our choices and acting on them.
Thoreau also wrote that “to affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”
I love this thought because it can happen through the smallest intentional acts. We choose to play music, cook something, or call someone. We decide this is how we want to spend the next hour of this finite life.
Each time an intention becomes an action, the day becomes more our own. It becomes something we choose and not just something that happens to us.
Taking photographs used to work this way too. A roll of film might give you 24 or 36 exposures and pressing the shutter meant using one. Each picture you took had to be intentional because it was so finite. You had to decide if that moment truly deserved to be preserved.
Then days later after the film was developed and printed, those intentions came back as physical photographs. Then you had to decide which ones were worth keeping, maybe even going into a photo album. Years later you can open someone’s album and encounter a series of choices they made about which moments of a life deserved to be kept and cherished.
I think this is probably the bigger part of the renewed attraction to vinyl records, printed books, and other physical forms. They give our intentions somewhere to go. They involve our hands as well as our minds.
Through these actions, our choices gain a presence in the world.
Our relationships work through repeated choosing too.
We choose to listen and hold space for a friend. We can choose to spend an evening together with a romantic partner or group of friends. We can choose to return the next day, and the next day again. Over time, these thousands of choices build into something we call a friendship, partnership, or even a family.
To embrace something means that you keep choosing it.
There is no great significance in walking across a room to turn over a record, but there is in the intention and choice to act on it. The world changes, in some small way, because I acted.
This is human agency in its most basic form.
Maybe one reason modern life can feel so unsatisfying because we have fewer opportunities to experience this sequence of intentional living. Technology increasingly decides and acts on our behalf; an episode finishes and the next one starts. The next recommendation arrives before we’re even done contemplating what we’ve just experienced.
But the record waits for me.
Its waiting for my thought to become an intention and then an action. And some small thing in the world happened today because I made it happen. In this case it was choice to play Side B, then to listen to Blood, Sweat, & Tears 3.
Mary Oliver ended her poem The Summer Day with a great question I think about often: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
What will you intentionally choose today? And tomorrow?
