Everything about Billy’s living room is set up for listening to vinyl, and one Friday night every month, we gather at his house to do just that. There’s no TV in the room, just a tall pair of speakers standing at attention, pointed at a pair of leather chairs that recall the old Maxell Tape ad from the ’80s. Billy has spent a lot of time and money tweaking the sound in the room, but I’m more of a music fan than an audiophile, so I’ll just have to take his word for it. What I’m here for are the stories and the tunes.
I joined this Album Club in January 2020, when we could still gather in basements to share the music we love with one another—“like a book club but with records” was how it was originally explained to me. The premise is simple enough: each month someone brings a vinyl LP and explains their choice, then they play each side in silence with a break in between. But as great as the joy of intentionally listening to a variety of albums was, it was those explanations that kept me coming back.
There was Lionel talking about his time as a DJ in Haiti before spinning Bossa Combo’s Accolade; there was Steve talking about growing up in Louisiana as we listened to Professor Longhair’s Rock ’N’ Roll Gumbo. When the pandemic hit, we moved from basements to Zoom calls with everyone pressing play on Spotify at the same time and going on mute. When social distancing standards loosened, we moved to outdoor gatherings with Nick playing Prince’s Sign O’ the Times in the backyard before settling into Billy’s living room.
Getting up before a group of friends and new acquaintances and talking about an album you love can get surprisingly personal, even vulnerable. When you think about the music that is most meaningful to you, you think of friends and loved ones, road trips and concerts. The introductions at our gatherings have ranged from Dave talking about his band that almost broke through in the ’90s to Brandon giving us a deep dive into Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films, a bizarre compilation that saw Tom Waits singing “Heigh Ho” and The Replacements covering “Cruella De Vil.” Lawrence keeps taking things up a notch, as the first to introduce a full PowerPoint presentation and then getting a personalized video message from the lead singer of his latest selection, Soul Sound System from Danish R&B band D/troit.
Choosing an album isn’t easy. There are so many records that have meant a lot to me and a couple I might have chosen had they not already been picked (Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On? and Frightened Rabbit’s Midnight Organ Fight—and yes, I teared up at the latter). But for my most recent pick, I landed on Vigilantes of Love’s Killing Floor soon after its vinyl re-release. It’s an album that’s not available on any of the streamers, but it means a tremendous amount to me. It’s likely that there wouldn’t have been a Paste Magazine without it.
I was a freshman journalism student at the University of Georgia when I first interviewed lead singer/songwriter Bill Mallonee for The Red & Black about his participation in a local Human Rights concert. His answers had me tracking down my first Vigilantes of Love cassette, and I was hooked. When Killing Floor came out the next year, I began sharing it with everyone I knew. I convinced friends from Auburn to come up to concerts. I joined the VoL message board and made friends there.
Among the dozen or so people attending that night, most hadn’t heard the album, but three certainly had. Thirty years later, two of those Auburn kids and one guy from that message board remain three of my closest friends and fellow Album Club members. It was a piece of history the rest of the group got to share with us, a point of connection that deepened much more recent budding friendships.
And that’s really what Album Club is about. We live in a time where a loneliness epidemic has hit half of all adults in the U.S. It’s become statistically more difficult to make friends in our youth and much more so as we age. Book clubs, hobbies, a Friday night gathering at a brewery—all these things can combat that, but none of them give you an excuse to buy more vinyl. So think about joining or starting your own album club, and let me know what album you’d want to share with friends.
