How a turntable changed my family’s relationship to music and quality time

It began with one record, singer-songwriter Josh Ritter’s Hello Starling. The album was originally released in September 2003, just a couple months before my now-wife Steph and I started dating. It was the soundtrack to our first year together. I owned it on CD back then, but had long since parted ways with my CD collection.

And yet, here it was again, now on vinyl, given to me by Steph to mark our 10-year anniversary. We didn’t own a turntable; I had no way of listening to the record, but that didn’t matter. It was the physical manifestation of the music that made us. After a decade or so of digital-only music, holding the record — seeing the album art in print and larger than an image thumbnail, turning it over in my hands, and reading the liner notes — felt like a revelation.

Vinyl records can feel impractical: They’re big, decidedly not portable, and a single album costs twice as much as several months of a streaming service that gets you more or less every song in history. But my family soon learned there’s a reason — besides Taylor Swift — that vinyl has staged a surprising comeback. Our turntable changed our relationship to music and quality time with each other, and started a new holiday tradition.

Learning to enjoy music as a family

A few years after that first gift, we happened upon a collection of hand-me-down records. I don’t remember where they came from, but it was a random assortment — some Beatles, the original cast recordings of Annie and The Sound of Music, music from Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers. Our kids were 6 and 4, beginning to form opinions about music, and I thought it might be cool if they could experience music as something visceral, beyond what they could access by shouting at Alexa.

I reached out to a friend who also happened to be a DJ and asked if he had a spare turntable lying around that he wasn’t using. He offered his Numark TTX, one of two he’d replaced with higher-quality Technics decks. I connected it to an old pair of crappy computer speakers, dropped the needle on The Beatles’ Revolver, and was hooked from the moment I heard the familiar warm popping sound at the start of the record.

Before long, the rest of the family fell in love too. The kids liked that they could put on a record and start an instant dance party. Steph liked the predictability — after years of Alexa playing the wrong song, it was nice to know that when the needle touched down, the music you chose would play.

The turntable started out in our office, but before long we moved it out to the living room. We got a set of Edifier bookshelf speakers and a new piece of furniture with space for our growing record collection. The turntable and records became the centerpiece of our living room and, by extension, of our life at home. We’d put on a record when we walked back into the house, play something quiet while we ate dinner, and then again to wind down at night after the kids went to bed.

You don’t have to be an audiophile (or friends with a DJ) to find the right turntable: They’re available at all price points and easy to just plug in and use. The Audio-Technica AT-LP60X is often recommended as a high-quality budget option for beginners; it features a fully automatic arm and options for upgrading later. The U-Turn Orbit, made by a small company in the Boston area where we live, offers a classy look for an accessible price.

A new holiday tradition

Soon after we got our turntable, records became a fixture of our family’s gift-giving practice. Every Christmas and birthday in the past five years has brought new records. We’ve given the kids albums in their Easter baskets, and Steph and I have exchanged favorites old and new at the holidays. It’s been a joy to rediscover the magic of giving music. It’s an inherently thoughtful gift that says, I know you love this album. Or, Since I know you so well, I think you’ll really like this one. As Rob, the main character in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, says of making a mixtape, it’s “using someone else’s poetry to express how you feel.”

There are practical reasons why records make great gifts as well. You can pick up albums on the cheap in the “used” section of a local record store (they still exist!) or you can drop a hefty amount for limited editions, foreign imports, box sets, special colored vinyl, or other premium offerings.

In our family, we now pay attention to each other’s streaming music and listen closely whenever someone talks about an artist they’re into. My daughter was listening to a lot of Gracie Abrams, so we got her The Secret of Us. My son somehow got super into Imagine Dragons, so we got him Night Visions and, when it was released last year, Loom. Neither of these are exactly my favorites, but they are vast improvements over the earliest records we bought for them: a Record Store Day Exclusive 45 RPM of the Paw Patrol theme song and the Frozen soundtrack were among their first vinyl.

Steph knows my music taste intuitively at this point, and there’s a never-ending list of albums I’ve loved over the past two decades that I either used to own on CD or only ever streamed, to say nothing of all the new music I listen to. She’s gotten good at creating pairings of old and new. One Christmas a couple of years ago she got me two old favorites — The Beatles’ Abbey Road and The Avett Brothers’ I and Love and You — paired with two newer selections, Ruston Kelly’s Dirt Emo and Mary Lattimore’s Silver Ladders.

For my part, I’ve kept Steph well stocked with Taylor Swift albums (in some cases both the original and Taylor’s Versions), as well as perennial favorites like Brandi Carlisle, Caamp, and Noah Kahan.

Recently we’ve been buying the kids records as a form of cultural education. They really should know Queen, we thought, so we gifted them Queen’s Greatest Hits. After the first day of school this year, my daughter thanked me for exposing her to so much music — her seventh-grade class played a music trivia game, and she impressed her teacher with how much she knew.

Buying records is also a way of supporting two struggling institutions we really believe in: local retailers (shout out to The Record Exchange in Salem, Massachusetts!) and independent musicians. We buy a record whenever we attend a show.

Last year, Josh Ritter toured for the twentieth anniversary of Hello Starling. Steph and I went, and at the end we made a beeline for the merch table. We already own Hello Starling, of course, as well as its follow up The Animal Years and 2019’s Fever Breaks, so we gifted ourselves Ritter’s 2007 album The Historical Conquest of Josh Ritter. This brought our Josh Ritter collection up to four — the most records we have by any one artist. Except, of course, for Taylor Swift.