Facing the music

Manitoba’s minister of finance spends his workdays contemplating the provincial budget, but Adrien Sala’s Sunday afternoons are often consumed by a passion for a more personal portfolio: a collection of vinyl records that exceeds 1,000 titles, stored in floor-spanning cabinets that serve as the centrepiece of his family’s Deer Lodge neighbourhood home.

“More or less, we redesigned the living room around the turntable,” says Sala, who as a New Democrat minister also handles the public service, the public utilities board and Manitoba Hydro.

The MLA for St. James is a certified record nerd, musicophile and songwriter with two albums to his name. At one point a regular onstage at the Times Change(d) High and Lonesome Club, Sala was a member of the roots trio Jackpine, playing the 2009 Winnipeg Folk Festival alongside bandmates Jaxon Haldane of the D-Rangers and Sean Buchanan of Western States.

When he decided to make a run at politics in 2019, Sala — who earned his last private-sector paycheque as the manager of operations for the Assiniboine Credit Union — knew he had to put his musical life on the shelf.

But last summer, five years after narrowly eking out a win for the hotly contested St. James seat, Sala decided it was time to dig into his record cabinets, starting a weekly social media video series called Sunday Sleeveface to connect with friends and constituents alike through his collection and theirs.

Each Sunday, the 44-year-old selects one “sleeveface” record, bearing the visage of the recording artist, holding the jacket over his own neck just so, replacing his own noggin with those of Leonard Cohen (New Skin for the Old Ceremony), Steve Martin (Let’s Get Small), Townes Van Zandt (Our Mother the Mountain) or Raffi (Raffi’s Christmas Album).

The series is Sala’s attempt to share musical inspiration with other music heads, including his friends and colleagues, who serve as occasional guests. Art City’s Eddie Ayoub wore two faces (Willie Nelson’s Always on My Mind and Nancy Sinatra’s This Is Nancy Sinatra); Deputy Premier Uzoma Asagwara chose Gil Scott-Heron’s Free Will.

In October, Tyler Sneesby, who spins records as DJ Hunnicutt, covered up with the fur-hooded parka Paul Simon wore on his 1972 self-titled record, Simon’s first of the post-Garfunkel era.

“When Adrien asked me to guest on his Sunday Sleeveface series, my first reaction was: ‘But Adrien, I sold most of my LPs a few years ago, and most of them to YOU,’” Sneesby wrote in his guest post.

Sala enjoys records alone, but says listening has always been for him a shared activity.

‘Growing up, there was always a record playing in the background. My dad had a pretty great vinyl collection and I think he passed that interest on to me. Then I started buying my own records at 15 or 16. I have great memories of getting on the bus in St. Vital and heading to the Village to Into the Music. That’s where it all really started,” he said.

Soon, Sala started writing and performing his own songs alongside covers. The first gig he played was with his childhood friend and former roommate Grant Davidson at the Java Zone on St. Mary’s Road.

“It was on the nose for what you would imagine a café in the ’90s to look and feel like,” Sala says, laughing.

“It was a good little spot. I think we did a cover of the Weakerthans. It would have been 1996 or 1997.”

Davidson, who has released five critically acclaimed albums as Slow Leaves, says Sala’s vinyl collection helped inspire him to begin his own.

“We used to spin records all the time in a house on Fawcett Avenue,” said Davidson, who chose records by Caetano Veloso, Jessica Pratt and the Dwight Twilley Band for his Sleeveface feature in November. “Back then, we listened to a lot of old country and ambient music. I guess I’d say he got me into Brian Eno and Gram Parsons back then.”

The Sleeveface series, which Sala shares amid regular political posts on his Instagram account (@adriensala_minfin), allows Sala and his guests to share popular music — Sala shouts out Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, John Prine and his daughters’ favourite, Taylor Swift — but also to share hidden gems that deserve wider recognition, including Tryin’ to Start Out Clean, the 1975 debut by the late Toronto folk singer Willie P. Bennett, and Lewis Baloue’s L’Amour, a 42-year-old album with an austere air of rarity.

“Only 100 original copies were made, and when someone discovered a copy in a flea market in Victoria, B.C., in 2008, the recording ended up being passed around on the internet and gained notoriety. Light in the Attic ended up putting out this repress of the album, even though they were unable to locate the musician, or even confirm his identity,” Sala writes in his post.

Sharing the elusiveness of the hunt is all part of the fun for Sala, who understands record-collecting isn’t just about the music, but about the sonic provenance embedded into and embossed onto every record jacket.

“The interesting thing about the medium is that it’s physical. If my daughter accidentally scratches the inside, that’s of course, a downside, but there’s also a flip to that,” says Sala, whose collection mostly consists of jazz recordings.

”There’s something really wonderful about buying a vintage piece of vinyl and seeing someone’s hand-drawn signature or an old sticker from the previous owner. That stuff’s great. It shows that vinyl has had a life of its own.”

Holy Grails

Sala’s record collection is alphabetized from Hasil Adkins to Link Wray, but the finance minister has a few vinyl investments he cherishes above all others, including a first pressing of John Coltrane’s ‘Live’ at the Village Vanguard, recorded in 1962 at the legendary New York City venue.

“I also have a strong attachment to my Neil Young records, like Tonight’s the Night,” says Sala, who’s passed the hobby on to his eldest daughter. “I have a number of records that I’ve searched for for a long time that I’ve been able to get a copy of, so I maybe keep them on an extra-high shelf so my kids can’t access them.”

While he loves his local shops, shouting out Into the Music and the shuttered Sound Exchange on Portage Avenue (now the location of Duly’s Records), Sala calls Toronto seller Aki Abe’s Cosmos Records his favourite store in the world.

Every trip out of town includes a pre-travel search for best record stores, he says.

“If there’s one record that’s a bit of a Holy Grail, it’s Roberto Musci’s Water Messages on Desert Sand. It’s just an unbelievably beautiful piece of music. I’m still looking and hopefully one day I’ll find it.”

[email protected]

Ben Waldman
Reporter

Ben Waldman is a National Newspaper Award-nominated reporter on the Arts & Life desk at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg, Ben completed three internships with the Free Press while earning his degree at Ryerson University’s (now Toronto Metropolitan University’s) School of Journalism before joining the newsroom full-time in 2019. Read more about Ben.

Every piece of reporting Ben produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.