The record I bought for the liner notes alone

I pulled this one from the bin because the back panel listed every session musician by first name and instrument, then added what they ate for lunch that day. The soprano sax player had egg salad. The drummer skipped lunch. The engineer, credited as "R.," brought thermoses of something described only as "mostly coffee."

The record itself is fine. Standards, a few originals that sound like standards, the kind of playing that knows exactly where the edges are and never goes near them. I've played it three times now and couldn't hum you a single melody, but I keep the sleeve on the table near the window where the light is good.

What the notes say

There's a paragraph about the studio—an old church basement with uneven heat and one window that wouldn't close all the way. You can hear traffic on a few tracks if you listen for it, which I now always do. Someone wrote that the room "wanted to be part of the session" and they let it.

At the bottom, in smaller type, there's a line thanking "the custodian who left the good chairs." No name, just that. I think about those chairs more than I think about the music. Whether they matched. Whether anyone took them when the session ended.

Why I keep it

The record lives between two others I play often—one I bought at a laundromat and one I never play before morning. This one doesn't care when it's on. It sounds the same at any hour, like it was recorded in a room with no windows and no clocks, even though the notes say otherwise.

I like knowing that someone thought the lunch order mattered enough to write down. That the thermoses were "mostly" coffee, implying something else, something the notes won't say. The music is almost irrelevant. It's there to prove the session happened, that the room was real, that someone ate egg salad and someone else didn't eat at all.

I'll probably never play it again. But I won't file it away, either.

— w.