November 6th, 2020

Years from now, as I look back on what helped get me through this time in our lives, I know I’ll still be humming the soundtrack of music that I listened to: my pandemic playlist. 

Music has been an important part of our marriage since our courtship. Well, actually, it's been mostly disagreeing about music.  The husband is a Grateful Dead kind of guy and I’m a Broadway kind of gal. 

But the pandemic and all the closeness it has provided has forced us to finally learn to love not only each other but our playlists.

My pandemic playlist includes the entire soundtrack of "Hamilton," which I get to sing out loud alone in my house. Then there's Lianne La Havas, who we saw with the BBC Orchestra in late February in London at what we didn't realize would be our last live concert of the year. Most recently I’ve been playing the entire song collection of the Chicks on repeat, including their newest collection, "Gaslighter."

My husband’s playlist has included a lot of his favorites like the Dead and Earth Wind & Fire, but because nostalgia is comforting a lot of us now, he's also rediscovering the music of our youth, like Hall and Oates.

A few years ago our family bought into the Spotify platform, with each of us making our own lists and then sharing it.  Every few weeks the husband would send the kids the playlist of a band he loved like Little Feat or the Outlaws along with the mea culpa, "I failed you" for forgetting to introduce them to their songs early in their lives.

Of course he didn’t actually fail them. We shared our love of all kinds of music with them, which helped them develop their own musical tastes.  And now we all get to influence each other again.

The biggest musical surprise of the pandemic has been our son’s interest in good old-fashioned vinyl.

A few weeks back he asked us to send some of our old albums for his new Victrola record player, but after searching through our storage unit we realized we no longer had them. Last year when we downsized, it turns out we downsized our music collection.  All the CDs and records we had brought with us from our childhood to adulthood were given away.

And now I regret it. 

Apparently, I’m not the only one. Alayna Alderman, vice president and co-owner of Record Archive in Rochester, says that many of her customers are empty nesters who are re-curating the record collections they had given away. 

She explains one of the appeals to the younger generation of vinyl might be how you listen to the music.  There’s the whole album experience of the beautiful artwork and expansive liner notes.  Then there’s the actual playing of the record, which can’t be passive — you have to put that record on and listen to a whole side and then get up and turn it over.

“The whole experience is interactive and engaging,” she said.

Record Archive has been busy this pandemic, especially with their online sales sending albums all over the world every day. There’s been an uptick in vinyl sales alone of over 130% in 2020.

Alderman believes the records we own are just like the books on our shelves, “they speak to our character.” Still, even Alderman the vinyl expert has a Spotify playlist because of its ease of use. Her pandemic playlist includes The Jayhawks, Amy Winehouse and anything Motown.

As I think about this strange time, I'm grateful that music played in any format will form a soundtrack that represents our values, our memories and, hopefully, how we made it through.

First Published in the Democrat and Chronicle and USA Today Network.