The needle drops and a subtle crackle emanates from the speakers, picking up speed and sound as a symphony comes to life. An earthy smell permeates the room and sunlight bounces off shelves upon shelves stocked with music. This is a record store, where the sensory delight of vinyl is as much a part of the allure as the albums themselves.
Corey Wolden is a long-time Bellingham collector with 1,200 vinyl records in his collection. He likened the experience of owning unique copies of his favorite albums to owning a copy of a well-loved book with markings in the margins and dog-eared pages.
“There are memories attached and especially with those records that I’ve owned for a long time and listened to a good amount, the experience is usually a combination of nostalgia and biographical reflection,” Wolden said. “Perfect digital audio can trigger this as well, but the vinyl brings it out in a more tangible way.”
Ritual Records is pictured in Bellingham, Wash. on Jan. 19, 2025. While Ritual Records has only been open since 2022, the space has housed record stores since 1989. // Photo by Madelyn Jones
Aaron Noice, another local collector, said he also feels there is a specific quality of sound that attracts him to vinyl.
“There is often a warmth to vinyl sound that people will talk about, which is easily lost in streaming; you can find that each sound [or] instrument within a track has space, like each instrument can breathe and be heard,” Noice said.
Most vinyl fans agree that there is something special about the intricacies that artists often put into albums, from lyric sheets to posters to the artwork on the front of the album.
“I love the idea of putting on a record and having to sit there and listen to it in the order that the artist intended, check out the liner notes, and then when it’s over, you flip it over and do the same thing on the other side,” Cory Blackwood, owner of Ritual Records said. “And I think that’s the thing that’s bringing people back to physical media in general, is that you get a deeper, multi-layered connection to the music.”
A mural is pictured at Ritual Records in Bellingham, Wash. on Jan. 19, 2025. The mural was completed in 2023 by artist S. Smith. // Photo by Madelyn Jones
Jilayne Jordan, a collector since 1983, wrote an article about the rising popularity of vinyl since the early 2000s. Jordan said she loves digging deeper into an album by reading the liner notes and thank you notes, as well as other tidbits that may have been included when it was released.
“Sometimes you would get a whole story about how they recorded the album, what the songs mean to them, all right there in your album, and that just doesn’t really exist anymore [with digital music],” Jordan said.
Though streaming has dominated today’s music landscape, the intimacy of vinyl remains intact for those who continue to cherish it.
“You’re never going to get rich or wealthy or maybe even comfortable owning a record store, but I can feel really good about what I do every day,” said Blackwood.
Madelyn Jones (she/her) is a city life reporter for The Front this quarter. She is a fourth-year news/editorial pre-major and anthropology minor. When she’s not working on a story, she likes reading and listening to music. You can reach her at madelynjones.thefront@gmail.com.
