It’s easy to think of music as ephemeral and essentially free, rather than a thing you can dotingly select, acquire, and present to your nearest and dearest. Yet music is a courageous and intimate gift. For decades, lovers—would-be; actual—have deployed painstakingly compiled mixtapes to communicate emotions that felt impossible to express otherwise. Music is a useful, even sacred way to commune with another consciousness. In that spirit, I have purposefully failed to create a list of studio-quality headphones or the best bluetooth speakers. (Much like people who instinctively cringe when someone says “A.I.,” I have an unfair disgust for any and all bluetooth technology.) Instead, here are some tactile, old-fashioned ways to honor sound and the people who make it.
Surely the best present of all is to manually thwart the dominance of streaming algorithms—simultaneously liberating your loved one from corporate surveillance and the echo chamber of their own taste—by letting the employees of your local record shop take the wheel. Two of my favorite ways to do this are Luna Music’s Sound Subscription Service, which is curated by the staff of this Indianapolis-based shop ($333 for twelve months, which includes twelve custom-selected albums, free shipping, and a T-shirt), or The End of All Music’s Record of the Month Club ($325 a year plus shipping, with bonus goodies each month). The End of All Music—which is located in Oxford, Mississippi, and is, for my money, one of the best record stores in America—also offers an excellent “We Pick ’Em” option if you’re looking to send a one-time infusion of new tunes. Venmo or PayPal some cash—anywhere from $50 up, though the shop recommends a budget of around $150 to $200 to allow for a broad selection—let the store know a little bit about what you like and dislike, and have one of their crackerjack employees curate a box of records for you. I’m a fairly obsessive follower of new music, with honed and uncompromising tastes, and, whenever I’m feeling burned out by my own proclivities, I get on the horn with Oxford and demand to be saved from myself. (Incidentally, a very good companion gift to any vinyl-based subscription would be Liz Pelly’s excellent “Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist,” a new book that investigates the grim consolidation of the music industry, and the cascading ramifications of frictionless streaming.)
Crosley Cruiser Plus turntable
True audiophiles might scoff, but I love to buy plug-and-play suitcase turntables for young kids—dropping the needle is such a tactile pleasure, and what happens next can feel almost otherworldly, a kind of conjuring. Secondhand stores are often loaded with old children’s records; keep an eye out for anything released by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, which issued dozens of surprisingly sophisticated kid-friendly LPs in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, by artists such as Ella Jenkins, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie. For the player, there are lots of brands to choose from; to my ears, they all sound about the same (tinny, yet triumphant). Crosley makes them in a variety of bright colors perfect for a kid’s chaotic quarters. (My four-year-old has a Crosley Cruiser Plus in a shade called “tye-dye”; on weekend mornings, she likes to play the Buck Owens song “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail” as many times as she can before I finally come staggering in.)
For the charming obscurist in your life, who has already heard everything (and left a lengthy Rate Your Music review), perhaps try this beguiling four LP collection by the heretofore unknown Rhodesian folksinger John Phillips, who has been called “the last great outsider folk discovery of the 20th century.” “Songs of Gentleness 1969-1976” contains every known recording Phillips made in the nineteen-seventies; there are echoes of Incredible String Band, Linda Perhacs, Donovan, Nick Drake, and Canned Heat.
Who among us has not been stymied by our own fear and paranoia, left paralyzed and unable to write? (Never me, of course.) Any aspiring artist—but especially any aspiring musician—will be grateful for these get-the-muses-going offerings, care of the legendary producer and ambient auteur Brian Eno. In 1975, Eno and the artist Peter Schmidt devised a deck of a hundred cards, each printed with a blunt aphorism intended to crack open some creative conundrum. The deck, called Oblique Strategies, turned fifty this year, but its wisdom (“Don’t break the silence,” “Disconnect from desire,” “Retrace your steps”) is eternal. This past March, Eno also co-authored a short book, “What Art Does,” with the illustrator Bette Adriaanse. The intention is much the same: What if we stopped being scared and let art be art? (Pair the two; await genius.)
The Record Runner is billed as “the world’s smallest record player,” which, frankly, is burying the lede—it is also a tiny, self-propelled Volkswagen bus, with a stylus jutting out underneath, that rides around the grooves in an LP. Would I let this thing roll over an exceptionally rare or expensive album? Not a chance. (“We advise you not to operate on invaluable records,” the company pleads.) But is it extremely funny to watch it cruise atop, say, an already kinda scratchy copy of Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours”? Yes. Sometimes we must choose whimsy over perfection.
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