It's coming back around again. Planting gardens, saving money and listening to music on vinyl.

Live long enough and the things you enjoyed and hated about growing up will return thanks to your peers and their kids. There are two reasons for this: 1) the people in your age bracket have money to indulge their nostalgia, and 2) their kids are exposed to these indulgences.

There's probably a much more complex way to look at trends, but that's pretty much it. Why did 50s rock make a big comeback in the late 70s? Why were Grease and Sha Na Na such hits? Because the early boomers thought their music was better than Led Zeppelin, and their kids thought Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta were hot. And, because nothing returns exactly the same, the sexual underpinnings of that early rock n' roll got amped up. The first many times I saw Grease, I saw it on network TV. When I saw the unedited version on video, I was shocked (kinda) by the lyrics of certain songs.

When I bought my first stereo (at a department store going out of business in the early 80s), I had a choice of one with a turntable and cassette or a similar model with an 8-track as well (cost about $20 more). I didn't have any 8-tracks and even my tween brain could see those things disappearing. So I got the one without an 8-track. My brothers and I bought lots of records in the 80s (our parents questioned these expenditures on occasion, but since I'm still a musician, I figure it all worked out for the best). We'd get something on vinyl and then tape it to a cassette for the car.

My older brother ended up with most of those albums. Until yesterday I hadn't owned a working turntable for over a decade. But my younger brother got his turntable back a while ago, and his fiancee brought a bunch of albums with her when she moved in. Since then we'd sit in the back room listening to a side of vinyl while grilling or doing laundry. There are skips and jumps on occasion. Pops and crackles. But listening to a side of vinyl is shorter than a CD. Fifteen to twenty minutes most of the time. I think that was what I forgot most about albums. It's hard to get bored.

I'm not starting the parade back to vinyl, by the way. It began a while back as a reaction to the reduced sound quality of mp3s. And, even before that, purists complained about the compressed sound of CDs as well. But lately it's become a bit of a movement. Current bands are putting out limited vinyl editions of their releases. They cost more (around $20 or more for an album) because press runs are small. I have a theory that someone working in the music industry bought one of the last remaining vinyl pressing plants and sold big artists on the kitsch factor of pressing new releases on vinyl. For me, though, I like going through the stacks of used records in thrift and record stores. You can always find a pretty good copy of something interesting. Interesting to you, at least.

I hope this resurgent interest in vinyl helps save some of the independent music stores still hanging around. Because you can't buy vinyl at most big box stores (or you only have a selection of about ten titles), so if you're going to start collecting the black round slabs of music, you have search it out.

And you have to look around for a good turntable. The most common types of turntables available are these things you're supposed to use to rip a vinyl album into digital form. They look so cheap you'd think they are disposable or will blow up after a couple of uses. But go to a musical instrument store and you can find a good one. That's what I ended up doing.

I'd picked up about fifteen albums before getting a new turntable. Already I have a few "gems." An anthology by The Band, which I played first, practically rumbled my apartment with the amount of bass coming through the speakers. The soundtrack to the animated version of The Hobbit (my old band played a cover of one of the goblin songs), and Jump On It by Montrose are two others.

The latter is not a good album at all. Sammy Hagar was the singer for Montrose on the first two albums, but this was their fourth. And while I thought they were named after the town in Colorado, they were actually from California and named after their founding guitarist. I listened to side two last night, and it made me cringe a bit. But the cover is a classic. And the back cover is, well, the backside to complement the front. I'm not saying there aren't good covers to CDs these days, but I don't think you'll see one like this. Google it. You can call me sexist later.

So now I have three distinct collections of music, sorted by the method of production. My extensive CD collection, my digital collection (which has some overlap from the CDs) on the computer and my nascent vinyl collection. I've also gotten permission to borrow vinyl from my brother's house on occasion, which is nice.

Oh yeah, I still have a chunk of cassettes (but no cassette player). I don't think those are gonna come back into vogue, even though I've always loved a good mix tape.

I guess it's still possible to be trendy at age 37.

Matt Worley is wondering if he gets to reclaim his vinyl copy of Guns N' Roses first album.