How a turntable changed my family’s relationship to music and quality time

It began with one record, singer-songwriter Josh Ritter’s Hello Starling. The album was originally released in September 2003, just a couple months before my now-wife Steph and I started dating. It was the soundtrack to our first year together. I owned it on CD back then, but had long since parted ways with my CD collection.

And yet, here it was again, now on vinyl, given to me by Steph to mark our 10-year anniversary. We didn’t own a turntable; I had no way of listening to the record, but that didn’t matter. It was the physical manifestation of the music that made us. After a decade or so of digital-only m...