Arctic Monkeys played on his Pandora station that he runs from behind the counter.

 

“I don’t know what it is about this band, but I love this guy’s voice,” said Blake Delaney, the new owner of Vinyl Cafe in Ames. “I love their energy. I’m getting a little older, so to like new music is good. It’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks.”

 

The past two months have been full of new tricks for Delaney as he rides the emotional roller coaster of being the new owner of the shop.

 

Through conversations intermixed with Delaney serving coffee to his customers and chatting with his regulars, I got to know the self-proclaimed ‘80s boy who bought the shop at the beginning of August.

 

I got things rolling with what I knew would be the most difficult question: What’s your favorite record? There were memories in his eyes, and his face lit up as it came to him.

 

“Oh, OK, hold on a second,” he said. “Let me just—I have to look up the name. Ask me another question.”

 

It was easier to remember the first record he ever bought—Boston’s self-titled debut.

 

“My mom got it for me, actually,” Delaney said. “I remember where I was. That’s the thing about albums; there are some albums that you can just look at in a record shop or wherever and you just remember where you were.”

 

He’d found the name of his favorite album

 

“Oh. Dire Straits, ‘Alchemy.’ It’s a double-live album. I’ll put it on.”

 

For Delaney, vinyl records encapsulate emotion. He keeps around 1,600 vinyl records at the shop but has more than 10,000 records in his personal collection. He said they hold memories, spark bonding and define their owners.

 

“There’s something very visceral, very real about vinyl,” he said. “It makes you stop. It is an experience. Anybody that likes vinyl gets it. Some people say it’s the crackling. I just love the whole process.”

 

A regular Vinyl Cafe customer not long ago, Delaney said the music always drew him in. He notices the memories that resurface when people flip through the records and the new ones that his sales create.

 

“I can’t believe how much polka music I’ve sold—to high school students! They’re, like, having parties, and they have a DJ spinning polka while they’re getting the next song ready,” he said. “I just never had anything as cool as that when I was young.”

 

Delaney graduated from Mountain View High School in Mesa, Arizona in 1985. He said it was a decade of great, innocent music.

 

“The ‘80s were awesome,” he said and laughed at himself, adding that he must be getting old because he’s talking about if he could go back knowing what he knows now. Nowadays, he is always searching for ‘80s records to stock his store.

 

“It’s music. Music is a powerful, powerful memory maker,” he said. “But so is coffee.”

—

 

In Delaney’s first weeks of owning the shop, a girl walked into the shop and went straight to the back room, which contains a jumbled mess of albums. In less than a minute, she came out with an album.

“I asked her how she found it, and she said, ‘Oh, I knew it was there.’”

 

The girl explained how she and a guy friend used to come to Vinyl Cafe to have coffee and chat until they both moved away. Now when they come to Ames, they leave notes for each other in the Al Jarreau album.

 

“I asked the girl if they are boyfriend and girlfriend, and she goes, ‘No, we’re just good friends, and this is our place,’” Delaney said.

 

She then tipped the album upside down, and all of the little notes came falling out.

 

“My mouth was open,” Delaney said. “It’s the coolest thing that’s happened in my shop so far. This is what I love about a record store. There are things that records do for people that coffee doesn’t.”

—

 

Keiva Delaney, Blake’s wife, has been instrumental in helping him manage the shop. He said that even if he had all the money in the world, he would not have been able to start running the shop without her.

 

“My wife is the best,” he said with a smile.

 

A joke of his brought the two together at People’s, a bar that used to be on Lincoln Way and Welch Ave.

 

“It’s not here anymore, which is kind of sad,” he said. “I can’t drive by it, but it’s in my memory.”

 

She saw that he had taped a photo of Buckwheat from The Little Rascals over his drivers’ license photo. “And somehow that made her laugh,” he said. “From there, that was it. We just fell.”

 

On Saturdays, she comes to the shop and they work together. He said his favorite thing is working with his best friend.

 

“I offered her a chance to get out of my car,” he said. “And she still took the candy and got in, and that’s 20-plus years down the road.”

—

 

“I like your jacket,” Delaney said to one of his regulars wearing a red vinyl jacket. “It’s a rock-star jacket. I need to start looking like a rock ‘n’ roll star once in a while—wear boots or a leather jacket or something.”

 

“I mean you’re a hip downtown business owner now,” replied the customer.

 

“And I wear golf shirts.”

 

“Golf isn’t hip. You know that, right?”

 

“You got your coffee, now get the hell out of my shop!”

 

They both laughed and continued their conversation, which covered Burger King, arm wrestling, Ping-Pong and whether golf is a sport.

 

Whether Delaney will sport a rock ‘n’ roll wardrobe has yet to be determined, but rocking out is in the future plans for his shop.

 

Vinyl Cafe held a four-band acoustic show for the Maximum Ames Music Festival. They cleared out the café and hosted a 40-person audience that came to watch the bands.

 

“We’re gonna start focusing on getting more live music,” Delaney said. “We gotta break the rules a little bit. We gotta get loud. We gotta get the cops called on us once in a while. We’re not just a coffee shop.”

 

He said there is a lot of good stuff on the way, comparing it to a little tsunami in the distance.

“I can see that wave,” he said. “And it’s just excitement. It’s coming, and it’s getting bigger.”

—