The Record Will Wait

On doorsteps, old albums, and the gentle rebellion of a story that refuses to be news.

By Rafi Mercer

There was a back doorstep at the end of the English corridor. It wasn't hidden, exactly. It just wasn't anywhere anyone needed to be, which is a different thing.

From there you could hear the school carry on without you. The music of play came from somewhere beyond the wall, rising and breaking and rising again. Teachers trotted to the staff room and back, in and out, their footsteps arriving before them and leaving after they had gone. None of it was meant for me, and all of it reached me. Sound comes around corners in a way that sight never does. You can be out of view and still be completely inside a place, if you keep your ears open.

What I remember most isn't the listening, though. It's the door opening. Now and then someone would come and find me, and they came because they had noticed I wasn't there. Nobody tells you, at that age, that this is one of the quieter forms of being loved. To be invisible to the world and visible to the few who come looking.

I think about that step more than I expected to, I think it's one of the energy forces I use when building Tracks & Tales.

When people ask me what I listen to, the honest answer has never really been a list of records. It has always been a list of people. Who I listened with, who handed me what, who sat in the same room while a side played out and said nothing, and who came looking when I'd gone quiet. Some of that I've written down before, in The Mixtape and the Buyer's Office. The records are real, and I love them. But they have always arrived carrying someone.

In 1936 the German critic Walter Benjamin wrote an essay called The Storyteller, and in it he draws a line I keep coming back to. On one side is information. It is valuable only in the moment it is new, and it spends itself completely in that moment. On the other side is the story, which doesn't spend itself at all. It holds its strength, and can unfold again long after the telling, because it carries the life of whoever told it. A story is less a piece of news than a thing that's been worn smooth by hands.

Read that now, nearly ninety years on, and it sounds less like literary criticism than a description of the morning. Almost everything that reaches us arrives as information. It arrives fast, and it's built to be replaced. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han has recently argued that this flood has pushed storytelling to the edges, and that much of what now calls itself storytelling is really selling with a narrative attached.

I don't say that with any bitterness. It is just the condition we're in. But it does make me look at a shelf of records differently. I've circled the same idea before, in A Story of Stories, and I suspect I'll keep circling it.

An album, a proper one, is a story in Benjamin's sense. It is not information. It doesn't update. Nobody pushes a new version to your turntable overnight. It is fixed at the moment it was made, by the people who made it, in the room where they made it, and that fixedness is the whole point. You can go back to it, and it will be exactly where you left it. You will be the one who has moved.

Marvin Gaye made What's Going On in 1970, and Motown released it in 1971 after Berry Gordy had doubted it would ever sell. It was shaped partly by what Gaye's brother Frankie brought home from Vietnam. The record had every chance to become information: a response to its moment, sealed inside its year. It didn't. Put it on now and the questions it asks haven't aged into answers. It is still asking.

That's the thing about a story you can return to. It doesn't tell you what happened. It lets you stand where someone stood.

And there is something quietly defiant in that. A record that takes forty minutes and asks you to stay for all of them is not playing the game the rest of the day is playing. It doesn't refresh. It doesn't know your name. It won't follow you around the internet afterwards. It simply waits on the shelf until you come back to it. I've always thought the best music is a gentle rebellion against the system. Not loud, not angry. Just a refusal to be consumed at the speed everything else expects. Not everything is for everyone, and the records that last have usually made their peace with that.

Some time ago I made a decision about Instagram.

I'd been sharing what I was building from the very start, the way everyone does. But I decided to use the account as a kind of journal as well. A place to hang an album each day. Not to chase reach, not to court the numbers, which rise and fall on rules nobody explains. Just a place to note something down, the way you'd turn a corner of a page.

It took me a while to see that I'd been doing the same thing with the record collection for years. It's all there, in one place. I don't really feel I own it. It's more that it's there. A shelf of stories that are still telling themselves, whether or not anyone is in the room.

There's an order I try to live by, written up as Listen, Read, Look, Watch. The order matters. Listening comes first because it asks the most of you and gives back the most slowly.

People talk a great deal about community now. It has become one of those words that hold whatever you pour into them, and so, in a way, it holds nothing. I've started to suspect that community isn't built at all, not in the way the word gets used. It gathers around a story that people are willing to sit inside together.

Japan understood this long before the rest of us had a name for it. The jazz kissa was a room where strangers sat in near silence with a record and an owner who knew exactly what to put on next. Nobody was being informed. Nobody was being sold anything. A handful of people who might never meet again stood, for the length of a side, in the same place someone else had stood when they made the thing. And the oldest way humans have ever learned anything was quietly going on: someone telling a true thing, honestly, and the rest of the room listening.

Some of the best lessons we have are already behind us, and they were never news. They are on the shelf.

I don't go back to the doorstep. It's not mine to go back to, and the corridor has long since belonged to someone else. But I go back to records the way you might go back to a step like that. Somewhere slightly out of view, where the world can still reach you if you let it.

The needle settles. Somewhere, footsteps cross to the staff room and back.

And now and then, someone comes looking.

What does it mean to call an album a story?

It means treating a record as something fixed and complete that carries the lives of the people who made it, rather than as content to be consumed and replaced. A story keeps its strength over time. You can return to it years later and find it unchanged, which lets you see how much you have changed.

What is the "gentle rebellion" in slow listening?

It's the simple act of giving one record your full attention, from beginning to end, in a world built around speed and interruption. It isn't a protest. It's a refusal to let everything be consumed at the pace the rest of the day demands.

What is The Listening Club?

The Listening Club is the Tracks & Tales membership, built around one album a month heard properly, from start to finish. Members gather online on the last Sunday of each month, wherever they are in the world, to listen to the same record together.

For more on the rooms, records and quieter corners of listening culture, subscribe and I'll write to you.

Every month, The Listening Club gathers around the world. Join here.