About Black Vinyl Stories
Black Vinyl Stories is an authentic media and storytelling platform built entirely around the music industry.
We hand the mic to the people behind the music and let them tell their stories in their own words.
We’re talking about the guitar maker in a tiny West Village shop, turning wood pulled from old New York buildings into instruments. The record store owner who booked the first shows for half the bands in town, right there between the bins. The band working double shifts and sleeping in the van between gigs, then walking on stage like it’s the only place they’ve ever belonged.
These are the people who make music what it is, and most of their stories never leave the room.
We’re here to share them, celebrate them, and make sure they’re never forgotten.
About Alex
The seed for Black Vinyl Stories really started with two separate realizations.
First was music.
When I was a kid, my dad would disappear into the basement and crank music so loud the floor shook under my feet. I’d sit at the top of the stairs trying to figure out what he was doing down there. I never really understood it.
When I got older, we started having real conversations, and he finally explained it. Certain songs had carried him through hard years. Some reminded him who he was. Others taught him something he couldn’t have learned anywhere else. Music was how he made sense of his life.
All of a sudden, that basement sounded different to me. Every one of those loud nights was him sorting through his life, one song at a time. And I started wondering if everyone had songs like that, ones that carry a piece of their life inside them. That opened up a deep curiosity in me about how music impacts us as people.
Second was storytelling.
I grew up in Colorado, and hockey was my whole world. It took me to Shattuck St. Mary’s, a hockey first boarding school, where life was 5am practices and the hunt for the next win. At 18, I hung up the skates. Nobody prepares you for that kind of silence. It felt like the turntable was still spinning, but there was no record on it.
I didn’t really have a plan, so I headed to CU Boulder, mostly because people told me it was the thing to do. Four years went by fast, loud, and messy, and I walked out with a degree and a feeling there had to be more.
Then at 23, right after graduation, it came out of nowhere. Bilateral hip surgery. Just months earlier I was finishing my last semester and wondering what came next. Now I couldn’t walk at all, and I wouldn’t for seven months. I had no plan, no direction, and I couldn’t even count on my own two legs to carry me. I could have let it swallow me, and some days it did. But at some point I decided that if I was stuck in that bed, I was going to use the time to figure out what I actually wanted out of life.
Minutes before they wheeled me in for round two on the other hip.
So I filled that bed with books, a journal, and a guitar. I read more than I ever had, wrote every day, and started learning to play. And for the first time, I actually listened to the lyrics. Keith Richards’ Life was my first read, and it lit a fire in me. Mac Miller was in my ears the whole way through. Keith gave me rebellion. Mac gave me the resilience to go chase something.
When I finally got back on my feet, I didn’t want to waste another day. I saved up for two years, stepped away from my job, bought a one way ticket, and left with a backpack, a journal, and a camera. I had no idea when I’d come home, or if I even would.
There was no itinerary. I went wherever the road pointed and said yes to almost everything. That’s how I ended up living in a shipping container on a beach in Nicaragua, riding a 14 hour train through the Sri Lankan jungle, and watching the sunrise over Mt. Everest from base camp.
Koh Tao, Thailand. My ferry was leaving any minute, but there was a guitar on the wall. Anywhere I found one on the road, I made time to play.
Along the way, I met a lot of people. I sat with Sherpas around a tea house stove in Nepal, rode with bus drivers winding up the coast of Albania, and drank coffee with tank drivers outside a little café on the cobblestone streets of Bosnia. In those conversations, I realized that sitting down and hearing someone’s authentic story was the ultimate way to connect and learn about not only the world around you, but also about who you are as a person. It was the same curiosity I’d felt about my dad in that basement, just with strangers on the other side of the world.
44 hours of travel to camp under this sky for a week in the Sahara Desert. Shooting the night sky is what made me pick up a camera in the first place.
Eighteen months later, I came home with a journal full of stories and a clear idea of what I wanted to do with them.
Black Vinyl Stories was born from wanting to couple that curiosity for music with that appetite for storytelling.
I don’t have it all figured out. I’m still the guy in the corner with a camera, asking questions and learning as I go. But every person we sit down with has something to teach, if you’re willing to listen. My hope is that through these stories, you pick up something new about the music you love. And if you listen close enough, you might find a piece of yourself you didn’t know was there. If there’s a life you keep picturing but haven’t gone after yet, I hope one of these stories is the reason you finally stop waiting.