Down the Street and Around the World in a Day

Today I made my weekly trek to Sounds Good on Sandy Plains Road, about two and a half miles from my house. (It seems strange to realize that there has been a vinyl specialty store near my house for almost a decade now and I never knew it existed until a couple of weeks ago! Of course, the store is so well hidden that I barely found it when I knew it was there... but it was worth the hunt, believe me!)  I went there with only one specific purpose: to exchange a Perry Como Christmas album that I purchased in duplicate last week. I didn't notice that the two different packages were the same musical content until after I got home, so I wanted to see if Rich would let me trade it out for another Christmas album--and he did, which I greatly appreciated.

While there, I rummaged through the vinyl again and came away with a trio of 1980s album: Vacation by the Go-Gos, The Secret Value of Daydreaming by Julian Lennon, and Around the World in a Day by Prince. The latter was particularly noteworthy to me, since (a) it's my favorite Prince album, and (b) it's one of the very first albums I bought on CD without having previously purchased a vinyl copy. So today's purchase marked the first time in my life that I've owned the album on vinyl!

Gave it a listen this evening, and it held up every bit as well as I had anticipated. "America," "Raspberry Beret," and "Pop Life" are all great tracks, and they seem particularly well suited for vinyl, since the overall tone of the album harkens back to the psychedelic period of the late 1960s. Now if I can find a copy of The Dukes of Stratosfear's 25 O'Clock and Psonic Psunspot on vinyl, I'll have album copies of my  favorite retro-psychedelic-music-era 1980s releases that I never owned on vinyl until now.

Got home and the mail brought me two more albums: A Clockwork Orange, featuring some wonderful early electronic music by Walter/Wendy Carlos, and an absolutely perfect copy of The Best of Cream--I've seen brand new albums whose jackets and vinyl didn't look this pristine! I really didn't need the latter album, since I now have every Cream album on vinyl, but The Best of Cream was my first exposure to the group, and this tends to be the order I expect to hear most of their best-known songs. The sonic nostalgia alone was worth the $8 I paid for the album...

So, a good day musically. The next object of my musical searchings: the first six Squeeze albums, a perfect copy of Michael Oldfield's Tubular Bells, and a really clean copy of Yessongs.