Classic Oakland Record Stores’ Favorite Songs on Vinyl

Sad? Depressed? Put on Luther Vandross. (📷: Clem Onojeghuo)

BY LAUREN PARKER

The first time I got keys to my new apartment, the one I had to find after being pushed out of my previous home of nine years, I took one look at the wooden floors and thought great, now I’m going to have to get into vinyl. 

So, I bought a record player.

2023 has been a year of complicated and unstable grief. My partner needed a change and joined the exodus of people who moved out of state, leaving me with mornings and evenings no longer filled with intimacy and companionship but whatever part of my life I allowed to swallow them up. My father is dying. Work is shit. The griefs are both metaphorically cataclysmic and pathetically mundane. So clinging to the romance of slow dancing on a dirty floor to the snap and crackle of the beginning notes of an operational turntable has been the thing keeping me going. 

I’m no stranger to being insufferable — my favorite liquor is bourbon, I spent my school years cramming classics and political theory into my brain largely so I could be wildly officious in conversation, and there was even the year where I snootily corrected the spelling of the graffiti on my school bus. 

Needless to say, it’s a miracle I have any friends at all. 

I seem exactly like the sort of person primed to have a lot of opinions about sound quality and medium and method. But I, like most urban renters, have been short on money and space. I never had room to become a Vinyl Guy. For the first several years I lived in Oakland, my speaker system was putting my phone in a bowl to amplify sound, which created a bit of a sharp quality that I still have affection for. Then I got a bluetooth speaker for Christmas. But most of my musical sound comes through the tinny audio of wired headphones, prefering to catch on every doorknob rather than try to remember to charge bluetooth earbuds. 

But in this new space, that I was going to fill with all of the life I could stand to haul up two flights of stairs, I thought about records. I considered the echo of my footsteps (better sound in the left corner of the room than the right) and hummed the most recent song I had on repeat to see if the projection worked the same. I tend to burn through songs by loving too hard, and living moments of my life set to soundtracks on loop until I hang them up for retirement and allow them to play in the distant wooded caverns of memory. I wondered if I tried that on an album if the groove would deepen so much that it would functionally break the technology. I made a note to ask someone who knew about records. 

I looked down at my new floor, the floor I would spend the next week filling with boxes and thought, I want to slow dance barefoot to records on this floor. 

Armed with no information on how to build a record collection, nor the soundtrack, I asked the only people I could think to consider experts: I asked people who worked in the record stores Open Mind Music, Contact Records, 1-2-3-4 Go! Records, and Mars Records.

Here are the songs the finest record establishments in the East Bay (within walking distance to my apartment) recommended to slow dance barefoot on a dirty floor to.

(📷: Victrola Record Players)

“Lonely Man” — Lionel Abel

This soul track has such sway. It’s a little too peppy in the beat, but the beat gives you plenty of time to really let your hips move. The song examines the isolation in a crowd, and how it’s impossible to shake it off. But it’s the sort of song where you want to beckon someone downtrodden closer to you and let your body move to the rhythm of their solace. I’m looking forward to diving in completely to “This Is The Place: Soul Music 1963-1974,” especially when there’s so much on this double LP, but I keep coming back to “Lonely Man,” even if it’s just to sway while holding my cat. 

“Anyone Who Had a Heart” — Luther Vandross

I mean come on. YOU keep your cool with Luther Vandross playing. But the Burt Bacharach cover is such a gorgeous R&B rendition that drips with the desperation of love. The sax adds such gorgeous drama behind Vandross’ emotional vocal runs, and a voice that is so heated with sex appeal, you’ll sizzle if you linger in it too long. There’s no way to not fall completely into someone when dancing to this, so be careful. Or don’t be. It’s dangerous. 

On the way out, the owners of the shop handed me a bottle of Lubanzi Chenin Blanc because a friend of theirs always brings wine and they had too many bottles for comfort. The record is stunning all on its own but this wine does add a wonderful sparkle to it. 

“Come to Me” — Otis Redding

“Come to Me” is “These Arms of Mine’s” little sister, desperate to be taken to the dance and you won’t leave her tear soaked and alone. Redding’s lyrical wantonness and vocal desperation has the exact sensation of digging your nails into the hips of someone who you cannot get out of your head but have somehow managed to bring home to your apartment. Don’t fuck it up. 

My only complaint is that at a tight two minutes and forty eight seconds, it’s a little short. 

(📷: CC BY SA 4.0)

“Blue Eyes You’re Not” — Rex

This moody song from Rex’s 1996 EP “Waltz” is not the sort of thing you slow dance to at your prom. But it’s the song you play because you didn’t have a suit and you wanted to pull your high school crush so close they could smell the clove on your breath and feel the pace of your heartbeat. This song makes the strap of your dress fall off all on its own. For fans of slowcore or grungier makeouts, this is a great song and the whole EP is elongated waltzes to get into trouble to. 

“Quand La Mer Furieuse” — Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru

The only track on this gorgeous piano record with vocals, this song was composed in Switzerland on a night too hot to sleep. Translated from French, the song lilts watching the beautiful sea and the waves go back and forth. I could not forget it. “Quand La Mer Furieuse (When the Sea Rises)” has a sweet, simple, tender quality to the melody, but if you google the translation of the lyrics they are DARK. The sows are drowning, the sows are drowning, just like the dogs, just like me.

The juxtaposition of holding someone close and making full contact with their body while the water rises is very honest, and the sort of morbid I deeply appreciate. This song contains its own summation for love and closeness, There’s nothing to lose, but everything to have.

“Einstein’s Idea” — Johnny Flynn

This one is my recommendation. Flynn’s “Country Mile” is a folk album that has one of the most breathtakingly mean and objectively hilarious reviews I have ever read, “If things get any more contrived his next album will feature a duet with a cow.” But the five minute forty seven second lullaby to his son explaining Einstein’s theory of relativity is such a sweet and lulling track that I have never not listened to it and imagined falling swiftly and safely in love with someone. Flynn’s repetition of oh my darling never feels forced but like a simple call of wonder in the landscape of being a small thing on a spinning rock. 

But like all good loves, the heartbreak remains all mine. “Country Mile” is out of print. 

Many thanks to the lovely people at Open Mind Records, Contact Records, 1-2-3-4 Go! Records, and Mars Records. I look forward to bothering you with wild goose chases in the future. 

Lauren Parker is a writer and mixed media artist in Oakland, CA. She’s the author of the chapbook We Are Now the Thing in the Woods with Bottlecap Press, and has written for the Toast, Strange Horizons, The Racket, Xtra Magazine, Catapult, and Autostraddle. Find her on Instagram @fuckyeahlaurenparker.