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Movie characters pondering momentous decisions are sometimes subjected to a raging debate between an imaginary angel on one shoulder and an imaginary devil on the other. Think of Larry "Pinto" Kroger deciding whether to take advantage of his passed-out-drunk date during the infamous Animal House toga party.

Audiophiles, too, are often pulled in opposite directions. But instead of angel's wings or devil's horns, our imaginary duelists are decked out in T-shirts, one with a logo that says "digital," the other with a logo that says "analog." Or tubes and transistors. Or that old favorite, Everything Matters vs Expensive Cables are Snake Oil.

I won't presume to adjudicate these perpetual rhubarbs, but I will confess to facing a battle of my own, waged between the Head and the Heart.

When German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774, he intended for readers to finish it, but not, you know, to end it. To Goethe's disbelief, his novel sparked a spate of suicides. The title character, whose obsessive love for a married woman was unrequited, ended up shooting himself, and soon the copycatting started. Young men of the era would dress just as the fictional Werther had—yellow trousers, blue jacket—and use a similar pistol. Often, a copy of the book was found at the scene. The number of deaths was unsettling enough that Italy and Denmark banned Goethe's novel. The German city of Leipzig even outlawed Werther-style clothes for a while. The phenomenon is now known as the Werther effect.

It's also one of my earliest memories: Windows down and heater up on a cloudy February morning, sitting backseat in an Arby's parking lot before kindergarten, the sound of heresy on the airwaves. Its replacement was Smooth Jazz. We—my father and my 6-year-old self—hated it.

Sasha Matson: Good morning from Cooperstown, home of baseball. Do you follow baseball?

Charles Lloyd: I played first base. I'm left-handed.

Matson: Does this new album, The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow, feel special to you?

Lloyd: It does indeed.

When Ken Fritz died, many people wondered what would become of his stereo system. Fritz's rig was the stuff of legend. The audiophile from Chesterfield, Virginia, had built much of it with his own hands, including line-array speakers too tall to fit in most people's homes. They took 5400 hours to complete and were appraised at more than $200,000. He also designed and built a three-arm turntable that sat on a unique 1500lb antivibration platform. Fritz felt that his "Frankentable" rivaled or bested record players costing well into six figures.

That was just the beginning.

There was a time in London, in the mid-'80s, when a party would invariably close with a couple of Pogues songs. It didn't matter what music had preceded them—it could be reggae or soul or whatever—but the Pogues would be played, to enthusiastic sing-a-longs by the party guests. Even I was known to join in occasionally.

As often as not, one of the songs would be the Pogues's cover of Ewan MacColl's "Dirty Old Town." It didn't matter that the song had been written about Salford (a city in Greater Manchester): Everyone would feel it had been written about their own town. This wasn't true just in my part of London, which has a large Irish diaspora, but in many other places across the world.

This was one of several gifts possessed by Shane MacGowan, who died November 30, 2023: Whether he had written the song or not, you felt he was singing about your world, your life.

We all have at least one cherished album that takes us back to the exact time and place we first heard it. Whenever we hear any of the music from that special album—regardless of whether it occurs months, years, or even decades later, of whether we hear it in the grocery store, on a car radio, or on a friend's playlist—we instantly reconnect with the feelings the music originally evoked within us.

Some of my old gear is boxed up in an offsite storage space, but almost all of my old LPs are within reach. I can reconnect with them and how they make me feel in a flash, with the drop of a needle.