Nekos and I often say that my love of clothes is equivalent to his love of music. Both take an equal toll on our bank account, and just as I'll slip downstairs in a new dress sort of hoping he won't notice that he's never seen me wear it before, he'll slip a new record onto the turntable sort of hoping I won't notice that I've never heard it before. Sometimes he doesn't notice my new dress because he is, after all, a dude. But I can't pretend that I haven't noticed that his vinyl collection has grown so mighty. We went from having several dozen handsomely worn records that we inherited from Nekos' uncle, aunt, and dad, to having hundreds and hundreds of records on shelves threatening to sag from the weight. The Groove in East Nashville is Nekos' second home these days.

This week he stayed up until midnight one night to make me a wicked vinyl mixed CD--recording some favorite vinyl tracks onto his computer and then putting them onto CD. On some songs I can hear the crackle of the dust embedded into the grooves of our older records. This is the tracklisting of the "vinyl CD" he assembled:

Heart "Crazy On You"
Kurtis Blow "The Breaks"
B52s "Mesopotamia"
Lulu "Love is to Love"
Robert Palmer "Sneaking Sally Through the Alley"
Elmore James "Done Somebody Wrong"
Ernie K. Doe "Mother-in-Law"
Jenny and Johnny "Love Hurts"
Jimmy Cliff "Many Rivers to Cross"
Luther Ingram "If Loving You Is Wrong"
Sly and the Family Stone "If You Want Me to Stay"
Ray Charles "You Don't Know Me"
Simply Red "Holdin Back the Years"
Stevie Wonder "Summer Soft"
Warpaint "Stars"
Betty LaVette "Sleep to Dream"
Rolling Stones "Let It Loose"

On my to-buy list are some old children's storybook records like these.

Don't tell Nekos, but I love our record collection almost as much as he does. I do, after all, love vintage clothes. It only makes sense that I like vintage music, too.