The Whole Story (The Unapologetically Long Whole Story)
MovingInStereo
Music has been the one constant in my life.
I grew up surrounded by recorded music. My grandparents had a lot to do with that. Over the years they gave me all kinds of radios—from little wrist radios to component tuners with an 8-track player. Some of my earliest albums were on 8-track: ELO, The Cars, the Beach Boys. I loved all of it. The equipment, the records and tapes, and especially the idea that you could put something on and suddenly fill a room with music.
My dad built a console that housed our turntable and a pretty rigidly organized music collection. At Christmas, I became the unofficial house DJ, working my way through those old Christmas record collections—the kind from Reader's Digest where you could stack records on the spindle and let them drop one after another. I can still hear my dad telling me to “stop messing with it!” Apparently, I didn't listen very well.
What I didn't understand then was how strongly recorded music was attaching itself to memories. I understand it now. A song can come on and suddenly I'm not just remembering a place or a person—I'm there. Music has always had that kind of time-travel quality for me.
When the Sony Walkman came along, music could finally go everywhere with me. Cassettes went along while I rode my BMX bike, on an old Sims deck and eventually in the car. And radio was a huge part of growing up in Houston. The DJs weren't anonymous voices. They were personalities you invited into your bedroom, your car and your life.
Through my friend Tom, that world became a little more tangible. His dad, Burt Perrault, was a well-known Houston radio voice. I grew up listening to people like John Matthews, Moby on 96.5 and 97 Rock, and Paul Berlin on KQUE—and I can still hear him saying “Bagdad on the Bayou.” KQUE was oldies and I loved those tunes and still do.
What fascinated me wasn't just the personalities. This was still an era when DJs could have a real hand in choosing the music they played. Before playlists became tightly controlled by programmers, the person behind the microphone could introduce you to something because they thought you needed to hear it. There was a human being on the other end making choices, putting songs together and sharing music with you. I think I understood pretty early that there was a difference between simply playing music and choosing music for someone.
On Fridays after we were out of high school, Tom, Doug and some of us would go to the radio station, where both Tom and Doug worked, and play albums for each other. We were serious music nerds—and liner-note devotees. We didn't just listen to the records. We read who played on them, who produced them, who engineered them, where they were recorded and all those little connections from one album to another. Steely Dan might be followed by ELO, Rush, Level 42, The Fixx, the 77's or Bird or Coltrane. The genre mattered a lot less than whether we thought the music was good.
And then there were mixtapes. My earliest love language.
I made them for friends. I made them for crushes. And I spent an unreasonable amount of time thinking about the order. It wasn't enough to put a bunch of good songs on a tape. What came next mattered. One song could make the next one hit differently. There needed to be a beginning, somewhere to go, and some reason one song belonged next to another.
Eventually CDs arrived and mixtapes became “mixdiscs.” Technology made getting to a song easier, but it never really changed the part I liked most: deciding which song should come next.
After moving to Austin in the late '80s, I found a Harman Kardon T-40 turntable. I still own it. And even as CDs took over and vinyl supposedly disappeared, I kept buying records. Through the '90s and early 2000s, I'd dig through the flip bins at places like Half Price Books, long before buying records became fashionable again. By the time I started DJing, I'd accumulated somewhere around 250 albums.
Then came 2018.
I was hanging out at The Elk Store with my friend Clint and Scott, one of The Elk Store's owners, when Scott mentioned that he was thinking about doing a “Vinyly Friday.”
I don't think he got much further than that.
Clint and I both jumped in with some version of:
“YES! We're in. When?!?”
That was really the beginning.
At first there were several of us involved, all filling holes in record collections that we'd spent years filling with CDs and downloads instead. Our friend Matty G was part of that early circle, too. Everybody was building collections. Everybody wanted to put together a set. Sometimes there would be three or four of us trying to get time on the turntables.
Before long, Clint (DJ Cheaters) and I broke out on our own, and MovingInStereo became our thing.
We started booking gigs around the Hill Country and beyond. We bought more records. Then more records. And then considerably more records. We learned by doing it—playing different rooms, watching people, figuring out what worked and, just as importantly, learning to trust where a set wanted to go.
Eventually Clint and his wife moved to Lampasas. He still spins records and serves that part of Texas, while I've continued MovingInStereo here in the Hill Country and beyond. I'm proud that the thing we started together is still part of both of our lives.
My sets today are usually three hours long, but when I really think about it, I'm still doing essentially the same thing I was doing with those mixtapes decades ago.
I'm deciding what song should come next.
There's no predetermined playlist telling me where to go. I pay attention to the room. I look through the records. I choose something. Sometimes it's familiar. Sometimes it's something somebody hasn't heard in 30 years. Sometimes it's something they've never heard at all. Then that record suggests another one, and another one after that.
The equipment has changed. The record collection has gotten considerably larger. And those old 60- and 90-minute mixtapes have somehow turned into three-hour sets.
But the instinct behind it hasn't changed much at all.
One of my favorite parts is watching people encounter the records themselves. People of every age stop and look at a record spinning on the turntable. They'll come over to see what I'm playing, tell me about a copy they used to own, recognize something they haven't heard in years, or ask about something completely unfamiliar. Those conversations mean a lot to me. So do the simple nods, smiles and occasional “yeah” from somebody who understands exactly why that record was the right one at that moment.
Maybe that's because I've never stopped feeling the same way about recorded music myself.
A lot of time, attention and care went into making that little piece of music. Somebody wrote it. Musicians played it. People worked in a studio to get it right. Eventually it was pressed into this little piece of vinyl that you can hold in your hands. Decades later, it's still sitting there waiting to do what it was made to do.
Great music is the only thing in my life that has NEVER let me down.
It's always there.
And every once in a while, you put the needle down and you're not standing behind a pair of turntables in 2026 anymore.
You're back in your parents' living room messing with your dad's stereo again.