Dear Citizens,
Kevin & Chris here. It’s Monday morning, the day before Election Day in America, a time, no matter how much or little you pay attention to current events, cannot help but feel charged with tension, not the good kind like when the whole world seems to stop before you set the needle down on the record, but the scary, uncertain kind like when you arrive home from an afternoon of digging and your best find slips from your grip and rolls towards the curb. And a street sweeper is approaching fast.
We get no high out of that kind of uncertainty. But this uncertain autumn in America has overlapped with the release of Vinyl Nation and we cannot overstate what kind of a relief that has been: When everywhere has felt bitter, here amongst you all has felt easy. When everywhere felt divided, here amongst you felt like the gatherings of friends we miss so much.
Out there feels really hard right now. Being friends with you all is a joy.
On the one hand, we shouldn’t be surprised. Record people are born knowing how to listen and understand that music, the language spoken by every culture on earth, means that people who love music as we do are mostly talking to rather than at each other. On the flip side, if you were to take a quick look at the 45 record people in our movie and the thousands that have watched, supported and shared it, you might just as quickly say, “How could all these people, who appear so different, have something so special in common? How do they seem like friends who just haven’t met yet, rather than a random gathering of strangers?”
And it would then be our pleasure to tell you what we have learned while making Vinyl Nation. We would smile, for a long time, and say, “Because they are good citizens.”
Citizenship is work—the work of belonging to, working for, and caring about something larger than yourself. At this moment in history, it seems perversely easy to erect fences around ourselves and decide who stays on which side based on what body they were born with or who they love or what they believe. That’s about the most selfish instinct there is. It takes no listening or decency to view others with all the maturity of picking kickball teams in elementary school. Past age 10, we should all know and do better.
Citizens and friends, you show us every day how to do better, how to be curious and seek sounds and experiences beyond ourselves, how to recognize both beauty and union in difference, how to know that the stranger who presses a record into your hand and says you MUST HAVE THIS is not a threat but an ally, even though you have never met.
You show us how to do the work of believing in each other, of knowing that we are all basically on the same page, that when we believe differences make us rich instead of poor, connected rather than divided, that then we are in fact, one nation under the groove.
Stay safe out there. Thank you for being good citizens, for believing in us, in this movie, but much more importantly in each other. No matter what else happens this week or this year, in Vinyl Nation, we all belong.
In 33 + 45,
Kevin + Chris