Introduction- About this blog
Hi, my name is Nill. I made this blog to chronicle a personal project of mine.
In 2022, after over a year of diagnostic tests, my father was diagnosed with Lou Gehrigâs disease. The deterioration of his body and mind over the past months had been so sudden as to blindside our entirely family. In July, he retired from his job of 14 years; In October, he was unable to walk without assistance; In January, he was gone.
As mom told it, my father always had plans for his retirement (an endpoint that only seemed to get further and further due to the realities of life): Over the prior 40-some years, he had amassed a huge amount of records, cassettes, and cds from any number of bands, singers, and projects that he had enjoyed. He hoped to listen to them on his personal music setup; a beast of a system complete with record, cassette, and CD players in two large wood speakers. When we moved for the first time in twenty years, we brought seven whole boxes of assorted audio/visual records with us, all of which have gathered dust over the last two years, as we tried to grapple with a life without dad.
In 2024, I took my first road trip with a group of friends. We were going to see a couple of bands across the midwest; one that I had never heard of, and another that I hadnât listened to in maybe eight years. For me, the trip had far less to do with music, and far more to do with a chance to meet internet friends for the first time.
During the second concert in Tennessee, for some reason I was grabbed by one of the opening acts on the stage. Itâs been long enough to this point that I canât recall exactly what it might have been, especially given all that was drank that night, but I do know that I was impressed to go to the vending table and purchase something to remember them by (and remember the night as well, given that it would likely be cheaper than supporting the main act).
Life events had given me an increased interest in physical media at the time. I knew that Vinyl had been starting to come back into the vogue; an old coworker of mine at Staples had been pretty into it, as had my sisterâs now-ex boyfriend. Iâd always admired the art of record albums, but had never given one a listen myself; when I was young, the record player at our house was up too high; and when I was old, I had my own toys to play with. As a show of support, and with little means or intention to actually listen to the thing, I bought my first record, Hereditary Deluxe by Cassadee Pope. A small handful of additional records would follow throughout the next year, totalling seven as of the time of my writing this.
In 2025, through nothing short of a miracle, I was once again gainfully employed at a proper profession. During the first few months, I discovered that working in the same place that I slept and streamed from was dramatically reducing my ability to focus during work hours. As part of the ever-evolving game that is managing ADHD, I elected to set up a personal office for myself in the messy and uncrowded loft next to my room. Slowly, this project to reclaim the area would expand more and more, adding on a study, display shelves, and eventually, a retooled media area. I knew that we had brought a number of DVDs with us during the move, and so I began scheming together a place where I could not just watch tv and play my switch, but also dvds as well. It was not a far step to include a record player in these designs, in an effort to finally make use of my growing collection of vinyl that had begun to accumulate on my shelves.
A month ago, while looking for the dvds in the cluttered junk of our garage, I once again discovered my fatherâs old records. And it was from the conjunction of these events that the idea for this project was formed.
Music had always been a part of my memories of my father; whether it be his acoustic guitar sampler that he would listen to while driving home from Grandmaâs, or the MoTab songs he would listen to while cooking Sunday Soup. Much of my indie taste and affinity to guitars, I wholly attribute to his early musical influences on my life.
My father made sure that this musical legacy would be brought with him even after the end of his mortal existence thanks to his collection of physical media. It was sudden tragedy that denied him a chance to fulfill his desires for his collection. And now, I had paved a path such that I was, however unintentionally, the only person in our family who could do what he had dreamed of doing in his latter days.
This is the background and treatise with which Iâm approaching this new project. My goal for the next however-long-this-takes is to listen individually to each of the records, cds, and dvds that my father left behind, attempting to return to the experiences that my father had always intended to. Detailed within these pages are the notes that Iâm attempting to keep, now passed on to you. If any of these items that my father cherished enough to keep through these moves sound at all interesting to you, Iâm attaching any Spotify or apple music links that I can find. I encourage you to give it a listen yourself if you can; good music is meant to be shared.
