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Think about the last song that meant something to you.
Maybe it played at your wedding or during a long drive with someone you love, or when all you knew because it was the one record playing, and you were sure it was “the song.” You didn’t know when to do a thing with your hands, so you just kept staring at the floor, but you remember every lyric. Do you remember where you were the first time you heard it? Can you picture what your life looked like at that exact moment?
Now, think about some of the other times you really gave a damn, the times when your inconvenient and bothersome present fell away. If it’s 1979, maybe you’re in the back row of a darkened movie theater in the mall, second-guessing your plan to sneak into Alien instead of The Muppet Movie. Or maybe it’s 1984 and you’re waiting in line outside a record store at midnight, trying to convince yourself that you’re not freezing because of your thin jacket but because you’re about to buy a copy of Born in the U.S.A. Or perhaps it’s 1993 and you’re at a Nirvana concert, shoegazing your way through “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” wondering if it’s weird that you’re more worried about your midterm exams than whether Kurt Cobain will survive his inevitable drug overdose.
You probably weren’t one of the people onstage or onscreen. You were just a face in the crowd, part of the anonymous masses, the kind of person who doesn’t usually get their name in the credits. And yet, for whatever reason, your brain made a note: “This. Remember this.” It decided this was something worth cataloguing, so it filed away the way the air tasted and what shoes you were wearing and how the guitar solo sounded slightly different from the album version.
It’s amazing how much of our emotional history is shaped by music. Some people have photo albums; others have journals, or shoeboxes filled with ticket stubs. For the rest of us, there are songs. A few opening chords on the radio can wormhole us back to a specific moment in time. A stupid pop song can make us weep because it reminds us of somebody we used to love, or a version of ourselves we barely recognize anymore.
But what happens when you can’t hear those songs anymore? What if the soundtrack to your life has been erased? That’s a question I had to ask myself not too long ago, when I realized that almost all of the records that mattered to me – the actual, physical vinyl albums I bought and obsessed over and played until the grooves wore down – were gone.
This is a book about what I did next. Once you’ve read the first familiar chords, will they still trigger old ghosts?
A few years ago, I was just another mild-mannered dad in his 40s, more or less holding it together, and not in any obvious midlife crisis. I wasn’t driving a sports car or dating a grad student; I was living with my wife and young son in Chicago, writing magazine stories and trying to remember to buy milk. My biggest extravagance was the occasional impulse purchase at a used record store, usually something sensible like a replacement copy of an album I’d once owned and then foolishly sold or lost.
One night, digging through an overstuffed crate at a neighborhood shop, I came across a battered copy of Let It Be by the Replacements. The cover looked exactly like the one I’d owned in college – same creases, same ring wear, even the same tiny cigarette burn on the top edge. For a second I thought, “That’s weird, it’s like my old record.” And then, like someone had dropped a needle on my brain, I realized: it was my old record.
There was no logical reason to be sure. The rational explanation was that it was just another copy of Let It Be that had lived a similar, hard-lived life. But my gut insisted otherwise. I knew that cigarette burn. I knew the way the corner of the sleeve folded over, as if it had once been stuffed into a backpack that was too small. I was holding a relic from my own past, something I’d sold or traded away years earlier, now mysteriously boomeranged back into my hands.
That should’ve been the end of the story. I could’ve bought the record, taken it home, and put it on the shelf, a neat little cosmic coincidence to tell at parties. Instead, it became the beginning of an obsession.
What if, I wondered, other artifacts from my youth were still out there, orbiting the same used record stores and dusty basements, waiting to be rediscovered? What if I could track down the specific albums I’d once owned – not just another pressing, not some pristine reissue on 180-gram vinyl, but the exact same slabs of wax I’d dropped a needle on when I was a teenager?
It was a ridiculous idea, bordering on impossible. Records don’t come with microchips or GPS trackers. There’s no master database of “Eric Spitznagel’s Formerly Owned Vinyl, 1982–1999.” Even if some of my records had somehow survived the purges and panic sales of my 20s, the odds of stumbling across more than one of them were microscopic.
But once the thought took root, it wouldn’t go away. I started imagining my former records as lost pets, wandering the earth with my name still faintly etched into their inner sleeves. I pictured them sitting in strangers’ living rooms, soundtracking other people’s lives, oblivious to the fact that they’d once meant everything to me.
I knew it was crazy, but I also knew that if I didn’t at least try, I’d never stop wondering. So I made a decision that, depending on your point of view, was either deeply romantic or deeply stupid: I was going to go looking for them.
Not replacements. Not upgrades. The very same records.
I started where anybody would start, in the places that had once felt like home: the record stores where I’d spent most of my adolescence, flipping through bins when I should’ve been doing homework. Some of them were gone, casualties of the digital music age. Others had survived, but in mutated forms – coffee shops with a few crates of vinyl in the corner, or boutique boutiques selling vintage T-shirts and $30 reissues.
At first, I felt like a tourist in a country I used to live in. The landscape was familiar, but the language had changed. Kids half my age were arguing about limited-edition pressings I’d never heard of, while I lurked by the classic rock section, hoping not to look like somebody’s dad who’d wandered in by mistake.
Slowly, though, I began to find my footing. I developed a method, a way of scanning the racks for telltale signs: a doodle in the corner, a price sticker from a long-defunct chain store, a smear of magic marker where I’d once tried to black out my name. I started recognizing not just albums, but my albums, the ones that had soaked up beer and bong water and teenage desperation in my bedroom or dorm room.
And every time I found one, it felt like bumping into an old friend I’d assumed was dead. I’d bring it home, drop the needle, and wait for the familiar pops and skips, the tiny imperfections that proved it was really mine. Sometimes they were still there, little sonic scars that no remaster could ever erase.
Of course, this was about more than just vinyl. I wasn’t only trying to rebuild a record collection; I was trying to reconstruct a version of myself. Each recovered album was a portal back to some earlier era – the kid who played air guitar in front of his bedroom mirror, the college DJ who thought a seven‑minute punk song was an appropriate way to start a party, the young man who believed that if he found the perfect mixtape, everything else in his life would fall into place.
Along the way, I dragged other people into my madness. Old girlfriends got emails that started, “Hey, weird question, do you remember what happened to my copy of…?” Former roommates got late‑night phone calls about whether they still had any of the records we’d shared. My wife watched, with a mixture of amusement and concern, as our living room slowly filled with precarious stacks of cardboard sleeves.
This book is the story of that quest – the miles driven, the basements dug through, the needles dropped, and the conversations sparked. It’s about what happens when you go looking for your past in the least abstract way possible: by trying to hold it in your hands again, twelve inches at a time.
Maybe you’ve never sold off your records, or maybe you never had any to begin with. Maybe your memories are tied up in cassettes or CDs or playlists you built at three in the morning when you should’ve been asleep. The format doesn’t matter. What matters is that almost all of us have some physical token that anchors us to who we used to be – something that, if it disappeared, would make us feel a little less like ourselves.
My tokens just happen to be vinyl records. And this is the story of what it took to get them back, and what I learned about memory, nostalgia, and the dangerous comfort of living too long in the grooves of the past.
Drop the needle wherever you like. Hope you hear something that sounds familiar.