A listening party at Grails began without preamble, when King Kenney, the shop’s owner, lowered the needle on Side 1 of Anti by Rihanna. The record, from his own collection, was cherry red. It spun on a yellow turntable, and the song “Consideration,” both urgent and contemplative, fuzzed out of pumpkin orange speakers. Kenney then circulated among visitors, some at the record bins, a few simply abiding from the airy floor space that dominates the shop. The display of Anti and many other records in tidy, artsy grids on the walls suggested a gallery opening, and in one corner, a Rihanna concert played silently on a large mounted TV. But the music, played at an encompassing but tasteful volume, was the party.
Kenney had announced the celebration of the record’s 2016 release on the Grails website. Suitable to a listening party that is also a birthday party (Anti was released exactly 10 years prior), the invitation promised cake. Later, after gently replacing Sides 1 and 2 on the turntable with Sides 3 and 4, Kenney mused that a lot of records from exactly 10 years ago were worth celebrating. “Beyonce. Solange… Frank Ocean came out. It was a very progressive year for contemporary soul artists. Anything was possible.” All three of those artists are scheduled for their own listening parties at Grails over the next 6 months. So are records by Metallica and Bob Dylan, celebrating older birthdays.
“Cultural impact, maybe even more so than personal impact,” helps him decide what gets cake. Reissued copies of all the aforementioned records are intended to be seen and proffered at Grails on their special night. But it’s important for Kenney that the records be heard, particularly by young people who are coming in fresh to record collecting. “Listen and learn,” Kenney says. “Or honestly, just be and exist. And not make it so transactional.” A record takes time, and a listening party creates it, as do normal store hours. “So we play chess, we do puzzles, we talk, we read, whatever. With music in the background. And then also have it in the foreground.”
Grails opened on Chapel Street four months ago, but it’s stocked with records Kenney had accumulated throughout his adult life. His library, by his estimate, numbers 30,000 records, some studiously purchased, others acquired in his capacity as a music promoter. Career-wise, he has never been far from music. “I was a music journalist. I worked in record stores. I was on air a little while in college.” Kenney was also “a programmer, artistic director of sorts at a cultural arts institution,” he says, “so I would book a lot of bands that kept me connected to music in that way.” Locally, in 2020 and 2021, he was in charge of marketing and communications at Long Wharf Theatre, but he found himself wanting to “own my own output and time.”
Between 2023 and 2024, he wrote and published a memoir, Space Bar Continuum, and a collection of short stories, The Harder I Faux. And once it came to starting his own business, he realized he already had an inventory. “When you look at my house, I have so many records. So maybe that’s the thing.”
Looking for shop space, he had been shown what would have amounted to “traditional” record store setups: simple shoeboxes, or, as he describes them: “Left wall. Right.” A narrow aisle between. “Feature things on the wall and you’re done, right? … I’ve come to love some of those stores during the accumulation of this collection. But this,” he says, “just feels different.”
We are seated in the shop as he says this, in cozy midcentury chairs with a small chessboard table and some music-related books for browsing. The record bins occupy one wall and, several feet closer, a low table with stools. One section ignores genre in favor of pure alphabetical sorting; the other toys with genre—and provokes browsing—with bin labels like “Hot Pants” and “Wollstonecraft.” The shop space wraps around a lightwell below ground level, creating side spaces that Kenney felt encouraged to fill with things other than records. You can duck off to a side room to play Scrabble on a board that’s mounted on the wall. You can color little cartoon sheets of iconic album covers on a child-sized craft table stocked with markers. When the shop space became available, still containing remnants of its previous life as a hair salon, Kenney pounced. “This, from the jump,” he says, “could be a space that you walk in and fundamentally know, ‘I’m not in any record store I’ve been in before.’”
He says customers, particularly young customers in search of a place to hang out downtown, responded by lingering. Whole chess games and coloring projects were completed while records played. Kenney thought he might have seen young people rendezvous in his shop the way they might in a student lounge, his records, either handled or heard, entering their hushed conversations. Kenney likes to be present for all of it. “As I’m selling off my collection, I can talk about music all day, and really know who’s taking this record off my hands that I played so many times.”
As a result, Grails recommends music in a human way, whereas Spotify and other digital music providers can only do it programmatically and, to date, clumsily, responding to prior choices to output more options based on broad assumptions. “There’s a certain responsibility that I think some of us as shop owners have taken on, to say, ‘Yeah, we love the sound, but also, I don’t know that you’re gonna find this in the algorithm. I don’t know that this is gonna get fed to you unless you went down a very strange rabbit hole.’” It was some of his first customers, coming in from an experience of music as pure weather, digitized and streaming through their earbuds, and finding crafted objects representing that same music, which had Kenney thinking of what he meant when he had first christened the shop.
“When I opened the shop, grails were ostensibly the things that are rare or felt too exorbitantly priced to be able to access.” A grail has a nearly objective meaning in record-collecting parlance: a mint copy of a specific pressing of an album deemed to be groundbreaking, especially if it was overlooked and underheard at the time of its release. “But in opening the store, what’s come to mind is that there are actually things that are more accessible to people that are just starting to collect. It’s like a grail to them.”
His records arrive every week. From storage facilities around the country, in cities and towns where he once lived and worked, he has been shipping them to himself. Or trusted friends have done it—neither party knowing exactly what went into the box. “Then I go through them here—which is fun; there’s a surprise element there—and then I re-listen, categorize and inventory. Maybe change bin names.” With something like 500 records arriving at a time, his stock of around 3,000 records will eventually swell to 10,000. He already has, for instance, 200 modal jazz records ready to deploy at the right moment.
So how does a record collector countenance letting go of his collection? For one thing, at a certain point, the personal collecting standard narrows enough that many of the albums that brought him there are no longer grails for him, though they may be for others. For now, Kenney plans to retain some items, like first pressings of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On and Patti Smith’s Horses, which Kenney likens to paintings (with subsequent pressings as prints). “This is like, when they first released it, it’s that whole original, everything about that. That’s the closest you’re gonna get to the artist’s statement.” He’ll play them in the shop, the sound of them in the orange speakers will prick the ears of whoever’s lingering that day, and he’ll offer reissues of them for purchase. One day, too, he’ll part with those originals, and anyway, that day will be as much about the person he finally sells it to and how they came to want it. “I think if it was just about commerce,” he says, “I wouldn’t have even had a place to sit.”
Written and photographed by David Zukowski. Image features Grails with owner King Kenney at right.
