Like many vinyl collectors, I went into a state of serious record store withdrawal during the COVID pandemic. For most of my adult life, I’d visited a shop at least once a week. Suddenly, many of my favourite record stores were closed or forced to improvise to keep the lights on: photos instead of browsing, flip videos instead of crate digging, email your order, send an e-transfer, curbside pickup. When public health restrictions eventually eased and stores reopened, shopping became a performance of precautions: sanitize, glove up, mask on, 6-feet apart, dig fast. The record store experience had been stripped of the intimacy and joy that once defined it.
For some record stores, these restrictions were a hassle, albeit a manageable and short-lived one; for many others shops it meant they might only ever see one customer at a time (if at all) with no assurance they’d even buy something. Small businesses struggle in normal times; during the pandemic, the pressures they faced were huge. Independent record stores, in particular, depend heavily on week-to-week cash flow with very little to insulate them from economic shocks associated with sudden closures: bills still had to be paid and they had all these new arrivals just sitting there, sealed in boxes on the shop floor, nobody to flip through them. Would their businesses endure? Could they keep their staff? Pay rent? Would customers return after getting used to the convenience of Amazon door delivery?
Like many collectors, I spent much of the pandemic taking stock. I cleaned records, reorganized my shelves, and listened closely. Outside, everything felt chaotic and uncertain. But inside, the ritual was dependable. Playing an album offered a small but meaningful sense of control. The brushing of dust from the record’s surface, the lowering of the needle, flipping the side, tracing credits, carefully sliding the wax back into its sleeve. This ritual slowed time. And in those drawn out hours, I thought a lot about my favourite record stores and the challenges they were facing.
With a modest budget and loose plan, I started to visit record stores wherever and whenever work or travel took me. Casual drop-ins gave way to purposeful field trips. Over the years I spoke with shop owners in more than twenty cities, towns, and villages across the country. Their stories covered a range of topics and themes: how their stores came to be, how they struggled, survived, and thrived. These stories became the spine of this book. Owners, staff, and customers offered plenty of music recommendations along the way too. And they talked about their lives, their communities, their failures, and small victories, their childhood memories of listening to records, and the role music played in shaping who they would be come. I arrived to this project thinking of myself as a reasonably informed music fan; I quickly became aware of how much I still didn’t know. My collection, and my understanding, grew accordingly.
Record stores act as catalysts for discovery, taste, and social connection. They shape the soundtracks of our lives, often invisibly, until years later when the music itself begins to blur. What endures are the impressions: hours lost crate-digging, offhand recommendations, stray conversations that gently but decisively rerouted how we listened and what we loved. Record stores don’t just sell music. They leave lasting marks, embedding themselves in our sense of time, in our memories, bound inseparably to the records we take home with us.
