Welcome to Groovin’ Together: Dropping the Needle on a New Chapter

Episode Description: Dropping the Needle on a New Chapter Introduction

What happens when the kids hit their twenties, the house gets quiet, and you suddenly have your weekends back? You drop the needle on a brand new chapter.

In the debut episode of Groovin’ Together, David and I are pulling back the curtain on our "second act." We are sharing how we traded a quiet empty nest for the thrill of the North Carolina antique circuit and a shared obsession with vintage vinyl.

Tune in as we discuss how we are navigating this exciting new season of marriage, and why we decided to fill our newly opened schedules with jazz, road trips, and dusty record crates.

In this episode, we cover:

• The Transition: Navigating the shift from full-time parenting to rediscovering our rhythm and prioritizing adventure as a couple.
• The Spark: How record-hunting became our ultimate shared love language.
• The 1,000-Record Mission: Unveiling our ambitious goal to build the ultimate vinyl collection (and a peek into the master spreadsheet we use to track the condition and market value of every single find!).

Whether you are a seasoned crate-digger, a fellow empty-nester navigating your own second act, or just someone who loves a good treasure hunt, there is a seat in the car for you.

Grab a cup of coffee, hit play, and let’s get groovin' together!

We have pulled the songs for you and created a playlist of all the songs mentioned. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAtDhNqC3U7M

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey everybody, and welcome to our brand new podcast, which is called Grooving Together. And we're dropping a needle on our new chapter. Why is this a new chapter for us? Well, we are a husband and wife duo, rediscovering life after our kids are grown. I like to call this uh the grown-up kids era where all the kids are doing their thing and we are trying to rediscover how we do our thing. And how do we do this? We do this uh with one record, one road trip, and one adventure at a time. I'm Sean.

SPEAKER_01 0:48

And I'm David, and we are just having so much fun going through this post-child life together. And so the great thing about raising kids is eventually they get to get their legs firm into the ground and begin to uh get stronger and stronger each day, kind of like Bambi. You know, Bambi came out and Bambi was shaky at first, and then Bambi got stronger, and then Bambi started wrong, and then what they say, uh, you're a man now. I maybe get my movies messed up, but you know what I'm saying. And when that happens, the house gets a little bit quieter, right? So we needed to find some sort of way to help make sure that we could reconnect as a couple and do some things that we were passionate about. So many times we would go on a trip, whether it be to uh a theme park or maybe a certain uh take the girls to a concert, and it was things that they would want to do. But now we're rediscovering the things that we have joy and brings us joy and things that we like.

SPEAKER_00 1:59

Yeah, that's right. I mean, I loved being a mom, and I'm still a mom. They're always gonna be my kids, but I needed to rediscover who Sean was, and I needed to rediscover who Sean and David uh were, and so we, you know, started with taking trips by ourselves uh for our birthdays, so we would take cruises or go out of town, like we found a concert, and we would spend a couple of days in the city or whatever, and those things are all well and good, but those are special things that you have to save up, pay for, and everything else. We wanted to start getting out of the house every weekend, and I wanted to start dating my husband again. So, what did we do? We started taking road trips, and some of those road trips were finding out where free jazz festivals were, and if they were close enough, we could take a day trip down there. If it was far far away, maybe we did an overnight and did the jazz concert or did the jazz festival or whatever. But something that we really still love to do is antiquing.

SPEAKER_01 3:21

Yeah, I mean, antiquing, I I think for me, uh I always like older things, so just being able to look at how older technology, whether it would be old stereo equipment or speakers, being able to take something that once made sound that's now broken and bring it back to life. I've always been interested in things like that, and you know, even in the early 2000s when most people were giving up on vinyl, you know, when I saw artwork uh on these records, it's just like something resonated with me. Like they took the time out to put all these wonderful, almost like art inside of these records to really help you connect with what the artist was trying to bring forth in the music. So when I think back to my working career working at Circuit City, I remember a lot of guys there were into jazz, and and it kind of got me into jazz because back in those times I was even though I liked some older stuff, I really didn't know many jazz artists. But I was introduced there, group that we'll probably talk about later on, uh called Urban Nights, and and uh from there I it brought me to a guy named Ramsey Lewis, and and then there's a whole lot of connections once you get to Ramsey and and all the great music that he's influenced and been a part of. But uh I'm getting ahead of myself, but taking these road trips really is a great way for us to connect because it doesn't necessarily take a lot of resources, right? Like you said, with the hotels, you gotta pay for the hotels, and sometimes you're down there multiple days and you have all these different things that you have to pay for. But with these road trips, and we find these different concerts that could be free, you know, we can build a whole like journey and adventure together, and that's what makes this so exciting.

SPEAKER_00 5:31

Absolutely makes it 1000% exciting, and I have grown to love and look forward to our weekends and where we're going. So some may ask, you know, how do you figure out where you're going? Well, you know, good old Google is helpful. Uh, we really started going to these jazz festivals. We learned about a jazz festival that's in High Point, North Carolina. The John Cole Train Jazz Festival is held the Labor Day weekend, and that was so fun. And we said, I wonder what other other places are doing jazz festivals. So we looked those things up. We found Jazz Festival in Norfolk, we found Jazz Festival down in Charleston, not Charleston, yeah, Charleston, but um Columbia, uh, Greenville, South Carolina. So, and we we then said, I wonder how many jazz festivals are there, and I wonder if that can be our goal for 2026 to just go to the free jazz festivals that are near and around us, and if we have to, you know, stay overnight for one of them or two of them, that'd be cool. So this year, thus far, we've gone to Columbia, Greenville, and Jacksonville. In Jacksonville, we stayed overnight uh for, and that was really cool. Um, but even on those road trips and even doing those jazz festivals, we found ourselves still going to the antique malls and the antiquing because we wanted to find the vinyls, the jazz, and everything. And I know that Dave mentioned that he he started falling in love with jazz with uh with Urban Nights. My love for jazz, it goes back a little bit further. I've always listened to the big bands because I loved the Hollywood 40s and 50s movies, so listening to Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, hanging out with my grandma and her church friends, and listening to their record. So my love for music goes really deep with the jazz, but I would say the one that really caught my ear, and I could say is mine, and it wasn't vintage, would have to be Boney James, and that album Sweet Thing, it grabbed me, and from there, I would say he and I really got into this as a couple and finding out about music, not just jazz, but jazz is the main one, but RB, hip-hop, um, but really just listening to music. If you are a music person that really likes to listen to the musicianship, I don't mean that you have to know all the technical terms, but you have an ear and you know what you like to hear, and you just really like the music, and to find another person like that that doesn't look at you weird or have judgment, but accepts you and even joins in, it's a it's a beautiful thing. So now with the girls being grown, like we said, we have now picked this up and doing antiquing every weekend, more specifically looking for vinyls now. We'll look for toys or china or some other things that we'll find in the antique mall, but the main thing that we are looking for are those vinyl records and everything else.

SPEAKER_01 9:37

Yeah, I think that antiquing just really went well with these day trips, you know, because you get down to the cities and the concerts, sometimes they'll start around noon, sometimes they'll start at three, and but you're in the area, you just you you just kind of find something to do. And so I think for us, it's like we really wanted to make it an event, like make this concert, jazz festival, or whatever music that we're going to for that week, make it an event. And Antiquin really gave us that opportunity to do that. And like you said, we we like all different types of music. Do you remember some big band stuff? Uh you know, I I remember watching some cartoons, and you see Cap Colloway, uh Cap Colloway or someone imitating Cap Colloway talking about Hody Haddy Haddy, you know. So I know big band. Yeah, I'm not just you know every night. I know a lot more stuff in this game.

SPEAKER_00 10:38

I know you do.

SPEAKER_01 10:39

I'm messing, I'm messing. But uh, but yeah, I think Boney James uh Sweet Thing was a great album that came out. He's got a lot of well-received uh smooth jazz, and I'm sure as we go through this podcast series, I'm sure we'll we'll have some uh things to talk about the guy with the fedora on. So well, I'm sure he'll come up a few times.

SPEAKER_00 11:01

But we can't forget about Kirk Whalem. He also came around the same time, colors. Um, and we had an opportunity last year to actually meet him. And I don't I don't fangirl out for a lot of people, you know, artists as famous as they are. They're still people, but one of the jazz clubs that we love to frequent is Middle C, which is down in downtown Charlotte, where you know it's a very intimate setup, and you actually get to meet these artists after they perform, and if they're selling merchandise, they can sell it. And I just about lost it when I saw him. I mean, because he meant so much to our relationship. He was there, he was there at the beginning of our relationship, really. Um, and colors, more specifically on their uh David, that song um called David. Absolutely beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 12:05

Yeah, it absolutely is beautiful because you know Kirk Whalem was a huge part of our relationship that really kind of just took us to a whole nother world, right? We we listened to music in a way that it really just opened up to us, and then to meet him, and he was super humble. Uh, he was able to uh autograph some see a CD for us and uh as well as a picture. So, you know, it's it's great to be able to not only connect with the music, but sometimes you can also connect with the community as well. So that I I really enjoy going down to like Middle Sea and enjoying those uh those artists there.

SPEAKER_00 12:47

Yeah, but definitely getting back to um the why that we go and do the antique and because we just have a genuine love for music and old things, right? So the vinyls are just a beautiful thing. I think Dave mentioned the artwork on it, but just seeing how all of these artists connect with each other and where everything is really lends to the theme that I love to have, which is we are all connected, and music is just one of those ways that we show our connection. So, as you can imagine, we're talking 30 years plus together. We have uh collected quite a few record albums, and so in our home, we had the records, but they weren't in any kind of order or fashion, and I know that you guys are just meeting us, but I'm sure it won't be hard for you to leap to. I'm I'm a little type A anal. So one day I said, you know, it would be really nice if we could go to our records and just be able to go to the A section, the B section, and I started that journey doing that, and uh with his help, of course, and putting everything in alphabetical order, putting everything on a spreadsheet, uh, with the artist, the category, the album, and even the low, medium, and high price average for the album, and what we came and walked away with originally was 417 albums and about 430 albums in total, that's including some of the ones that we have double and triple of. And now what do we do with that list? We take that list with us, not physically take the list, of course, but because we have technology, right? So there it's on my phone, and so when we go to these antique shops, now we can shop the vinyl for per with purpose.

SPEAKER_01 15:09

Yeah, I mean, it's it's really made a big difference, right? We can we it's no longer just kind of blindly picking up albums and hoping, oh, I hope we don't have this one at home. I don't want to duplicate anything, but now we we know, hey, we we don't have this album yet. Let's pick ahead and pick this up. Or, you know, if we find an album that we really, really want, we can quickly see, you know, how it would fit into our collection. So this been grateful. I'm grateful for you uh going through all that and and putting together that resource for us. So yeah, it's easy it's really make it a lot easier for us.

SPEAKER_00 15:43

Absolutely, and I think that also with that it gets into how do you know what the price is. I don't know about you, but um when I really started getting serious about picking out the vinyls, I would look at some of the YouTube uh videos that are out there, and you know I know some things, right? I know some things, I'm pretty good in the music category. David is really fantastic with the musicianship, but I don't know, I guess not confident enough enough to hold my own with these professional musicians. I just know I like to hear music, I know what I like to hear, and um, I want to make sure that I'm getting something that's good, and so for me, being able to have that list, I can say now this is the album that I want. I go in with a certain price that I want to pay. Uh, and no, it's not two and three hundred dollars. We're we're not doing, as my husband likes to say, the end of the rainbow prices. But, you know, somewhere between five to ten dollars for album, depending on the artists and what it is. And if I have an artist that I want to pay up on, you know, uh somebody that I gotta gotta have, no questions asked, I don't have to do any research like uh Santana, you know, maybe 20-25 bucks at the most, but having that goal in uh what it is that you're looking for is really gonna help you in the antique malls and your antique shopping. If this is something that catches your fancy and you want to kind of start that hobby yourself, making sure because those antique malls can be a little overwhelming. It's a it's a lot of stores that are in there.

SPEAKER_01 17:49

Yeah, I mean, this hobby right here, if you want to get into collecting vinyl, you don't have to spend a lot of money. I I'm I like to say that I'm frugal, so if I'm going out to look for vinyl, like my wife said, I'm looking for you know five to ten dollars a vinyl record, and I think that's reasonable for most albums, right? But sometimes you have to pay up, you know. If it's something like prints, yeah, you're probably gonna have to pay up for you know purple rain first print. Now that's it, but that's not to say you have to get the first print. There are so many great records that are now being made uh that are being reproduced. So Antiquin is one way you can get the records, reproduction records. I'm not snooty to say, oh, you got a reproduction record. Hey, it still spins. That's the way I see it. It still spins, it's still in the group, baby. So it's just, you know, you gotta do your collection the way you gotta do your collection. But uh, you know, being able to go out and find the vinyl, it's it's just so exhilarating to find something that maybe you heard when you were in seventh or eighth grade, and then you hear it again, and it's almost like you're hearing it for the first time.

SPEAKER_00 19:04

Yeah, absolutely. And if you can't tell, we definitely geek out over music and things of that nature, and sometimes we find records that are very interesting, and it leads us down into a rabbit hole. Like uh a couple of weeks ago, we were at one of the antique malls somewhere, somewhere in Hickory or somewhere right there, and we ended up buying found Mr. Magic, uh, Grover Washington Jr. You know, that's that's a must-have in anybody's jazz collection, and to find it, and it was only ten dollars. That was amazing. Now, another artist that I'll that I will get without any question is Roberta Flack. Like, how can you not like her? So, we also found I feel like making love album with Roberta Flack on it, didn't even look at the songs that were on the back. It was Roberta Flack. It was an album that I that we didn't have, so we got so when we got home, and of course, the first record that we played was Grover Washington Mr. Magic, because why not? Um, I'm reading the Roberta Flack, and on the back of it, I say, Hey, she has uh Mr. Magic on her album. I wonder if it's the same song. So we played her album, and guess what? Sure is everything, it was the same song with words. Did you know that? So, what do the nerds, the fellow nerds, do? We hop on the computer and start researching and finding our stuff. Dave, you want to tell them what you found?

SPEAKER_01 20:55

Yeah, I found out that the songwriter for Mr. Magic was Ralph McDonald. And Ralph McDonald was not only on Grover Washington Jr.'s album, but was also a contributor on Roberta Flack's album. Not only that, we found out that Bob James, one of our favorite jazz pianists, who's got a lot of songs sampled in hip-hop, was also on Grover Washington Jr.'s album as well as Roberta Flack's album. So there's a lot of connectivity and overlap in that 1975 record, and they were released just a month apart from each other in February and March of 1975, respectively.

SPEAKER_00 21:39

Yeah, so that's what we do, that's what we love. So if you hang around with us a little while longer in all of our episodes, we definitely will give you moments like this to geek out on. And if you haven't taken a chance uh to listen to Roberta Flack, now you might have already known that. Congratulations. I'm just now today years old and finding this out. So it's a really cool song. But if you haven't heard it, uh, I encourage you to look it up. Or, hey, guess what? Go on a road trip with us and groove together with us through these antique uh malls and and find that vinyl and and get one for yourself. So we're gonna try to wrap all of this up with what is our end goal with this, because some people always asked us, you know, you're going out to get all of the vinyl. When are you gonna stop? Because right now, now we are at 483 different artists and albums, but 517 total albums that we have, including the doubles and the triples. And so we set a goal. Dave, what was our goal?

SPEAKER_01 22:56

Our goal is to get 1,000 unique records into our collection, but not only unique albums, not only unique albums, but albums that we're going to listen to.

SPEAKER_00 23:11

And I think that is important as well to make that that distinction that these are albums that we are going to actually want to listen to towards the end. And so we said, why not why not do this podcast and bring these people on our journey and invest in on our adventures that we have uh with getting to that thousand vinyl record mark. I think that that is gonna be absolutely fabulous. And if you join us the next episode, we love to give you updates on where we're at um and in this vinyl antiquing journey. But the main thing is that we want to communicate to you that it's important to understand that your spouse that you're with now is not the same spouse that you had 20 years ago, 10 years ago, heck, even a year ago. You know, leaving room for evolvement and and um allowing them to learn who they are, and you learning who you are, and learning who you guys are as a couple, and finding what is fun, that's the most important thing, and that's what we really I guess the overall theme uh to this uh podcast is is about in learning how to love yourself and love each other, especially after you got your grown kids and you're in your grown kids era. So want to thank you.

SPEAKER_01 24:58

Yeah, thanks, and welcome to the crew get into the groove.

SPEAKER_00 25:04

Yep, so maybe next time, if you hit that uh subscribe button so that you get notified whenever we update uh and put out new episodes. Maybe you can grab a coffee and groove together with us as we go on our next episode for our adventure, which will be this weekend. So um, y'all have fun and keep grooving, and hopefully groove together.