A record played start to finish, no skipping, with someone you actually want to listen with. (~45 minutes, two seats, low light, drinks within reach.)
We’ve stopped knowing how to listen to whole albums. The streaming services trained us out of it. The shuffle button trained us out of it. Putting on a record at a party and asking guests to please not talk over the second side feels eccentric now, where forty years ago it was just what you did.
We want to recover this practice as a date.
Here’s the form. (Forty-five minutes for a typical LP. Two chairs facing roughly the same direction, not opposite each other across a table — talking is not the goal, listening is.) No phones in hand. Drinks on side tables. Light low enough that you can close your eyes if a song asks you to. The record gets put on. The needle drops. You listen.
This is harder than it sounds. The first three minutes you will both feel a faint awkwardness, because we’ve been trained to fill quiet with talking. Don’t. Let the awkwardness pass. By track three you’re inside the album. By the end of side one you’ve forgotten you’re doing a thing. Side two flips. The record ends. There’s a second of silence, and somebody says something, and the conversation that follows is unlike any other conversation you’d have had that evening.
What you talk about, when you talk: the obvious things — what you noticed, which song surprised you, the lyric that landed. But also the things music opens up — what year you first heard this, who you used to listen to it with, the version of yourself that liked this album fifteen years ago and how you feel about that person now. (Two glasses of wine, a small cheese plate, no other plan for the evening.) The conversation will be different from a dinner conversation. Closer, maybe. Slower.
A few records that work especially well for this date. Blue by Joni Mitchell — cliché, we know, but the cliché is correct. (Thirty-five minutes. Devastating.) Kind of Blue by Miles Davis if you don’t know each other deeply yet — there’s room inside it. (Forty-five minutes.) In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel if you both came of age in the early 2000s. (Forty minutes — heavier than it sounds, sit with it.) A Love Supreme if you can both handle Coltrane sober. Pet Sounds on a Sunday afternoon with a window open. Songs in the Key of Life — that’s a two-evening date, side one and two on a Friday, sides three and four on a Saturday.
The format also works with album-length pieces that aren’t strictly albums — Spiegel im Spiegel by Arvo Pärt, Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich, the second movement of any of the late Beethoven quartets. These are quieter, longer. They’ll change the temperature of the room.
What you’re really doing on this date is sharing time. (Forty-five minutes is more time than most couples spend looking at the same thing simultaneously in a given week.) The album is the excuse. The shared attention is the substance.
It’s an old-fashioned thing to do. Old-fashioned things are coming back into fashion. The thing about an album played all the way through is that you cannot half-do it. You either listened or you didn’t. If you both listened — really listened — you’ve done something together that nobody else did with anyone tonight.
Find your local equivalent
A turntable is ideal but not required. A good Bluetooth speaker and the original album played in order on a streaming service works. The discipline is in not skipping, not in the medium.
A note on US record stores
Most major US cities have a serious record store: Amoeba in LA, Rough Trade in New York, Reckless in Chicago, Bop Street in Seattle, Twist & Shout in Denver. A first-date version of this evening: pick a record together at the store earlier, then take it home and listen. The pre-stage at the store is half the date.
Listening · Music · Album · Vinyl · Established · Comfortable · Weeknight · Staying In
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