Wax Memory: A Daughter's Journey Through Her Father's Vinyl Collection

“A song is a room, however happy or sad, wherein you or I might dwell,” intones folk songwriter John Hartford, opening his album 1968 Housing Project. “And each is a never-ending thing, that I might come back to again, and again and again at any chosen time.”

Housing Project is one of 60+ albums featured so far on the TikTok account @soundwavesoffwax. The account is run by Jula, a Canadian musician documenting the process of listening to her late father’s vinyl collection.

Every day, she selects a record at random from his thousands of alphabetized albums, listens to it in full, and shares her reaction on the app. Since beginning the process in September, Jula has amassed 80K followers on TikTok and over 300K on Instagram. Jula is building a community of music lovers who are dwelling in each room with her — even if they aren’t literally there while the album spins.

“I did not expect this at all,” says Jula over the phone. When a friend suggested she share her process of going through the album collection, she thought maybe 10 people would follow along online.

It’s easy to see why the videos have gone viral. Jula takes viewers through each record with a compelling charm. For a video about Russian folk singer Ivan Rebroff, she dresses up in furs while listening to the record; spinning Marianne Faithful’s “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan,” she writes a note-to-self: “ride sports car through Paris,” as the song describes.

Some of the records are brand new to her, while others are treasured favourites. She falls for the intimate poetry of The Roches and grooves along with the meditative rhythms of Santana. Sometimes, she tells stories about her dad alongside the albums, like when they saw Bachman Turner Overdrive together and he fist-pumped the whole way through.

But this isn’t a one-woman show. Jula’s commenters are part of her listening process. They come to her page to find cool new albums, to share their memories of the featured records, or to share memories of people they’ve lost.

“This is my fav series on here,” one comment reads. “I lost my dad 3 years ago and it’s beautiful to find ways to connect to him still even now through what he did and loved.”

With @soundwavesoffwax, Jula is building a digital library that doubles as a personal tribute, where memory and discovery go hand in hand.

Time-traveling on TikTok

Jula’s dad passed away a few years ago. She needed time to grieve before she could think about how to engage with his records, especially on a public level. Now, diving into his collection with thousands of strangers feels like a gift.

“I get a lot of really beautiful messages and comments from people that make me cry or make me smile,” she says. “I feel like I’m just getting so many warm hugs from strangers.”

Asked why the project has resonated so strongly, she muses that it’s like a time capsule — a way into the past through one person’s perspective.

Most of the albums come from the 70s and 80s, and diving into the collection feels like a window into the popular culture of the past. Pop behemoths like The Beatles and Billy Joel sit alongside underground art curios like The Residents’ Meet the Residents and acclaimed contemporary classical works like Philip Glass’ Liquid Days. Together, they provide a sense of the seismic developments in rock and pop — from the advent of genres like prog and punk to the wide use of synthesizers — during that period.

They also give Jula a new perspective on her dad. A lifelong music fan, he dreamed of being a DJ, and imparted to Jula a love of deep listening from a young age.

“I would listen to full records with my father and that would be the activity,” she recalls. “It was always around listening as ritual or as a form of its own. Instead of watching TV, I would listen to music.”

That philosophy informed her life trajectory: Jula studied sound and now makes experimental electronic music. As much as she was shaped by her dad’s approach to music, though, she didn’t know how wide his taste could range.

“I think I was a little judgmental because he always talked about The Who, or he was always talking about Paul Simon, and I was like ‘oh, he only listens to mainstream music, he was never getting into those hidden gems’,” she says. “Which was totally not the case. He has really crazy eclectic taste.” As it turns out, she jokes, they’re both musical weirdos.

Music taste can tell you a lot about a person: what kind of emotions animate them, what kind of communities they participate in, which dreams haunt them. We make playlists for our crushes to share small pieces of ourselves (and also to impress them), as if to say: this is what brings me closer to the world. Diving into someone’s record collection can reveal intimacies that don’t show up in the grind of daily life.

It also creates common ground. Jula’s videos get hundreds of comments, often from people reflecting on their own relationship to the album of the day. “I grew up listening to Alan Parsons Project with my dad, who passed away in 2012,” reads a comment on Jula’s review of Eve. “I remember making this album a soundtrack to my imaginings on road trips.”

The commenters treat Jula’s listening as an open-ended process, contributing their own knowledge and building a body of work together. Listening to pianist Erroll Garner, Jula notices quiet vocals in the background, but she can’t make out the words. Commenters explain that it’s Garner himself, who hummed and vocalized while playing. Oscar Peterson did it too, they note.

“My father was always talking to me about music, so if I was listening to an album with him, he would tell me all the tidbits, such as it was recorded in this studio, and they had this guitar that this guy also played…,” she recalls. “People will comment on my video and say those fun facts to me and I’m like ‘aw, it’s like what my dad would say to me.’”

At the beginning of the process, Jula was nervous to share her thoughts on each album. Though she was already a sound expert, talking about pop music felt like new territory for her. The first videos are very aloof and deadpan, almost keeping the emotionality of the project at bay. But she’s loosened up since then, thanks to the encouragement from commenters.

“I would just like to say, for all of the people who are following along on my journey, how much it means to me and how grateful I am to be having this music dialogue,” Jula adds.

Albums on Their Own Terms

Jula’s non-judgmental approach makes that dialogue possible. She takes each album as a legitimate project, setting aside her personal preferences. Even when she plucks albums that don’t suit her taste, she tries to describe their most exciting elements. (The Sex Pistols’ Flogging a Horse is “very expressive”).

Her reviews make for an accessible mode of music criticism that encourages conversation. “Do you guys like this album? Too corny for you?” she asks of Elvis’ Something for Everybody.

“Great soft album to have playing when you need to relax,” one commenter answers. “The majority of his recordings just didn’t age well,” another contends.

Occasionally, Jula will exert editorial control over the random selections. When Kris Kristofferson died at the start of October, she spent two days memorializing him, sharing that she had to break the news to her mom. In an October 2 video, Jula highlights Kristofferson’s role in outlaw country supergroup The Highwaymen, with Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson.

“When we lose songwriters such as Johnny Cash, Waylon and Kris Kristofferson, it’s like losing a piece of history, and a moment in time,” she tells the camera.

Jula’s project works toward recovering part of that history. In an attention economy, it can be hard to step away from the constant churn of new releases and encounter an album from the past. Even making time to listen to any album — new or old — in full, with no screens or distractions, feels rare.

“One thing that’s really cool about this series is that you’re making a low key argument for the album as a coherent object of art,” a commenter states. In opening the time capsule of her dad’s record collection, Jula taps into nostalgia for modes of engagement with art that feel disconnected from algorithmic incentives — even as you’re literally watching her videos on TikTok.

“On my first post, one of the top comments is somebody saying ‘I hope my children do this but with my Spotify liked songs’,” Jula mentions to me. The concept seems bizarre: would they just hit the shuffle button? It also betrays an assumption that all the music in streaming libraries will stay there forever, when it’s really at the whim of corporate licensing negotiations.

“When we die, especially in the digital age, everything that we have online kind of goes off with us,” Jula reflects. Digital archiving is possible, but requires foresight. Entire online lives can be lost when a password gets lost or a website goes under.

Streaming services have also individualized listening to a new degree. “We’re kind of able to hide our tastes in a way,” Jula says. We can erase any parts of ourselves we find embarrassing, curating our tastes for public consumption through social media. She suggests that people used to listen more as a collective practice, on record players or club sound systems instead of headphones.

But her TikTok account shows that collective listening is still very much possible, in myriad forms. If her followers aren’t hanging out with her in her bedroom, they’re still shedding light on her dad’s record collection — and, by extension, some of the most ephemeral parts of her dad.

After all, in Hartford’s words, songs are never-ending things. Even if a particular vinyl breaks or a digital file disappears, the song itself — an arrangement of notes and words, built for interpretation — can always take on new life.