Brett Milano

Brett Milano, a Boston-based music critic and author, writes about listening communities, local scenes, and the habits through which fans organize musical life. Vinyl Junkies carries the subtitle Adventures in Record Collecting and follows enthusiasts whose shelves, searches, and rituals extend far beyond casual ownership. St. Martin's Griffin published the 2003 first edition, a study of the psychology and anecdotes surrounding sound-recording collecting. Milano visits people with unusually specific pursuits and asks what gives rare pressings, obscure sides, and complete artist runs their value. Musicians and artists including Peter Buck, Thurston Moore, and Robert Crumb appear among the interview subjects, but ordinary collectors remain central to the inquiry. Milano is less interested in ranking records than in understanding what motivates the hunt and what a collection comes to represent. Vinyl Junkies treats collecting as a social practice, a form of memory, and sometimes an obsession whose stories illuminate the many ways listeners build identity and community around music.