Good morning! I hope y'all had a wonderful weekend. I know I did! My wife and I got up pretty early for a weekend to go line up at our local store. Nashville is known as the Music City, so Record Store Day is sort of a soft city holiday! The biggest record store in town is Grimey's (https://www.grimeys.com/), but that really isn't my scene as much as a smaller, closer store to us called The Groove (https://thegroovenashville.com/), so that is where we decided to go. 

We woke up at 0630, and while of course I was ready to go in a matter of minutes, my wife, no matter what sort of affair or errand we run, ALWAYS has to make sure she's ready to be perceived by the world, so we left our house at about 0800, hoping to wait in line for about 45 minutes. RSD sort of caught us off guard, as we found that American RSD for 2022 and 2021 didn't really feature a lot of records we wanted to get. This year however, I was ready to chase the SunO))))Boris reissue of Altar, a record i never owned on cd. I was a huge fan of Boris in my 20s and still am today, although trying to keep up with their releases seems like it takes a level of dedication i simply don't have. Someone just needs to reissue "Pink" and I'll be absolutely delighted!
My wife wanted to chase the record of one of her favorite new wave bands, A Flock of Seagulls. This album featured B sides and alternative mixes. Rare Birds indeed! They only pressed 1025 of these.

As we left the house, we started to realize that something was happening in the city that was going to make it very hard to get to The Groove quickly: a marathon! Most of the city's downtown area was blocked off so that runners could complete their trek through the city. Trying to find our route to the record store was incredibly tricky! Because of the marathon, we arrived to the store at around 0850, about ten minutes before the store, and with about 50-60 people in line.

Record Store Day is such a fun little exercise. I cannot speak for the type of person who basically just buys stuff to resell it online, but for me, I get in line and what is at play essentially is "are my tastes unique enough that the records I want to buy will be there when it is my turn to look?" Because I hadn't really saved money for RSD this year, I had to limit myself to 4 records maximum vinyl is an easy way to go broke quickly! When I do RSD, I like to look for of course, music that truly moves me, things I know. I also like to take my chances on albums with art that inspires me. I will listen to a song or two from the artist to understand what I'm getting, then I listen to the rest of the album blind. Maybe it's just my taste in album art but I've really never gotten a record like this that I hated! 

However, I was actually quite worried that I would not find what I was looking for because of how far back we were in the line, farther back than we have ever been on one of these days. I was not going to sweat it, I could live without any of these albums (none of them were YMO anyway. PLEASE ISSUE YMOS ENTIRE CATALOGUE IN AMERICA ON VINYL PLEASE!!), but finding them would be nice, especially if I was going to wait the hour it would take to get into the building.  The Groove is essentially right outside a neighborhood, so there were cars parked on the street as far as the eye could see. I could imagine it must really suck to live in a place like that sometimes. We eventually started to move. My wife and I always love to try and drop in on conversations around us, and while it was a little chilly it was nice to be outside. As the line started moving slower and slower I started to panic, imagining the reason it started moving slower is that people were searching more and more for albums that weren't there. Surely my albums were already bought up!

Hilariously enough, disappointed girls started pouring out of the store. Taylor Swift had released something this year on vinyl, and even though I imagine we got more copies of it than anyone in the world, it had still sold out before we got inside. Wish she'd come home and talk a little shit about what's going on in our city.
We ended up doing OK! I found 3 of the 4 records I was really looking for, and although my wife did not find the big album she was looking for, she found most of the stuff she wanted. 

As we tried to leave, the marathon had been in full swing, and getting home was an absolute nightmare! We spent at least an hour in our car trying to navigate the marathon route. I went in circles a few times. The city probably didn't submit the route to any of the apps because they constantly tried to send us down blocked roads. I took my wife to get some Grey's (https://www.greyscheese.com/), something she's come to really love. I'm not really about fancy cheese but you definitely get your money's worth of attention in this spot! 

We just chilled until our 8PM showing of Evil Dead Rise. We don't get a ton of opportunities to go out and spend it up these days, so splurging a lil like we used to was a nice treat. I'll just have to be super stingy for the rest of the week. 

[movie reviews from my letterboxd]

Shin Ultraman (2022): 4 star
Evil Dead Rise (2023): 4.5 star