Nine Records, One Week's Wages, This Sunday

The session is recorded. Here's what's in it — except the name at the centre.

By Rafi Mercer

Two Technics 1210s, a Linn Classik, a pair of B&W speakers. That's the whole rig. No studio, no console, no engineer in the next room. People sometimes imagine these sessions are made on something exotic, and I understand why — but the point of the Listening Club has never been the equipment. It's what goes on the platter and the order it goes on in. The decks are workhorses. The amp is twenty-odd years of doing one thing well. The speakers tell the truth. That's enough.

The session is done. It goes out this Sunday, and anywhere in the listening world can watch it.

First, the cost, because I want to be straight about it. The nine records in this session cost a week's wages. Some are originals, some are repressings — and the difference between those two things matters more than most people realise, which is why I wrote about it properly in the pressings essay. A week's wages sounds like an indulgence until you remember what a record is: an asset that plays. These aren't files. If I ever need the money back, the records go back into the world and someone else gets to keep them spinning. I don't expect to. I see it the way I'd see any investment — except this one works every time the needle drops.

Now the shape of the thing. The session runs from 1939 to 2004 — sixty-five years — with one album at its centre that I'm not naming until Sunday. What I can do is walk the arc, because the arc is the argument.

It starts before he was born. Billie Holiday recorded Strange Fruit in 1939 — Columbia refused to touch it, so she cut it for the independent Commodore label, and the NAACP later called it the song of the century. Sam Cooke heard Bob Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind in 1963 and, in his brother's words, decided a Black man should have written something equally as good — so he sat down and wrote A Change Is Gonna Come. He performed it live exactly once. Two weeks before it was released as a single, he was shot dead. That's the tradition the man at the centre of this session was raised inside: church music, protest music, beauty made under pressure, songs that carried more than their runtime suggests. When he sat down to make the album we're playing Sunday, Holiday and Cooke were the water he swam in. He didn't quote them. He didn't need to. They were already in his hands.

Then there's what he was listening to sideways — his contemporaries. Roberta Flack, his university classmate, released Killing Me Softly the same year, on the same label. Hers went to number one and won three Grammys. His barely sold. Barry White was building orchestral soul across town in the same two-year window, having taught himself music theory in juvenile detention. Sting comes into the session too, from an angle — Shape of My Heart opens the evening, a guitar figure built on Bach-like counterpoint, and the man we're circling studied Bach at university. The connections aren't decoration. Every interlude in this session is load-bearing.

And then the future — the part he never got to see. D'Angelo, who recorded Brown Sugar at nineteen and named this man as his primary influence: the piano that sounds like a voice, the voice that sounds like an instrument. Erykah Badu, whose Baduizm was cut live in twelve hours with no overdubs, the Fender Rhodes warmth traced straight back to him. Lauryn Hill, whose vocal on the Fugees' Killing Me Softly — the same song Flack sang, twenty-three years on — carries his restraint as its primary tool. John Legend, session pianist before solo career, the same road this man walked through Chess Records thirty years earlier. The album at the centre of this session didn't sell in its own time. It sold its influence instead. Every record in the stack is part of what it bought.

So that's Sunday. One album, played in full on vinyl, on two ordinary decks through an ordinary amp, with nine records around it spanning sixty-five years — the tradition it came from on one side, the music it made possible on the other. Members watch first, wherever they are. The name arrives when the needle does.

What equipment is used for Listening Club sessions?

Two Technics SL-1210 turntables, a Linn Classik amplifier, and B&W speakers. Deliberately modest, seriously chosen. The sessions are about the records and the sequence, not the hardware — though everything in the chain is there because it tells the truth about what's in the groove.

Should I buy original pressings or repressings?

Both appear in this session. Originals are cut closest to the master tape and carry the era in their grooves; the best modern repressings can be cleaner, quieter, and far more affordable. Neither is automatically better. The full breakdown is in the Tracks & Tales pressings essay, covering originals, reissues, and remasters.

How do I watch a Listening Club session?

Sessions are shared privately with Tracks & Tales members and can be watched anywhere in the world, on any device. Each session is one album played in full on vinyl, with a chosen record between the tracks. This one releases Sunday.

Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe, read the daily, or explore more venues.