Musical Alchemy

Sometimes the process by which life changes can resemble something like magic. This is how Walter Thorington describes his journey from financial analyst at the University of Texas to the owner of a record store. More than magic, though. It’s transformative, lifechanging, alchemical.

Hence the name: Alchemy Records.

“Music is alchemical in nature,” Thorington said. “The idea behind Alchemy is change. “It’s a change for me in my personal life and my business life. And this is a college town. Change is very significant here. The moment you’re in San Marcos, you feel it. We’re all about changing patterns. You see college kids becoming themselves.”

Thorington relates strongly to the young and curious minds of the college students here at Texas State. A lifelong music lover, Thorington began collecting records at the age of 15 when he found a copy of the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour album at a flea market.

“I saw a whole Beatles collection,” Thorington said, “but little old me wanted that record because it had this 24-page booklet in it. Of course, I wanted that. I still have it at home. It was my first record. The first of thousands I’ve collected over the years.”

That was back in the 90s — at the height of the CD age — but when Thorington saw that vinyl at the flea market, he became a collector. “When I saw a record for the first time, I was like, I want those,” he said. “I didn’t even understand it.”

Yet it would guide him, once he moved to San Marcos in 2008, to the iconic shop owned by Bobby Barnard: Sundance Records.

“That’s where I grew my identity,” Thorington said. “I sought a job there because that seemed like where all the cool kids worked. I just love music, I love talking about music, and it always just really stuck with me.”

Under the tutelage of Barnard and then-manager of Sundance, Greg Ellis, Thorington honed his music knowledge and cultivated his understanding of how a record store should work. But he would tuck all of that away for later.

Thorington worked for Sundance until it closed in 2012. After graduating from Texas State in 2013, he worked at Premier High School in New Braunfels, teaching all subjects, though his focus of study had originally been English. Then he switched careers to work as a financial analyst for the University of Texas, which is what he was doing in 2020 when the pandemic shifted him to work from home. Then came the freeze in February 2021, when catastrophic flooding from an upstairs apartment flooded Thorington’s home.

“For five months, I had to live in the living room because the rest of the apartment was destroyed,” Thorington said, including thousands of the records in Thorington’s collection. “It showed me what was important,” he said. “My records are important to me.”

As Thorington began to price replacements for his damaged records in his collection, he had an epiphany.

“I realized I didn’t want to be doing this anymore,” he said. “I don’t want to be working for the man, for other people. That’s when I settled down and decided, ‘I want to do this.’”

Before finding a suitable storefront, though, Thorington sold records via a portable kind of pop-up record shop at conventions. Then, as convention season wound to a close, he saw the need for some decisions.

“I quit my job at UT to run a record store,” he said. “I’ve got to commit. I’ve got to make money. I decided it was time to make a spot here.”

That’s when Liz Rios of Red Bud Roasters coffee shop came into the picture. “When I asked Liz if I could run the coffee shop, she was like, ‘Go for it.’” Rios and Thorington worked together to slowly open Alchemy Records within Red Bud Roasters, a synergistic relationship that allowed the coffee shop to be open more frequently while giving the record store a permanent home.

“It opens up so much conversation when you serve someone coffee and you talk about music for a long time,” Thorington said. “They leave excited. They say, ‘oh man, this record… I’m really excited about it.”

And this is where the magic happened, because the record shop inside the coffee shop is where the nostalgia process begins. This process is something music lovers and vinyl collectors understand quite well, which is not only the music itself, but the deeper story of how that music entered a person’s life.

“The development of nostalgia is very important,” Thorington said. “It’s about the physical medium of the music itself. It’s about holding a record and saying, ‘this is mine.’ It’s a sense of character or a relationship with that artifact. When people come over to your place, they don’t look at your Spotify playlist. But they do look through the spines of all your records and get an idea of who you are. Sometimes, they can just say so much about a person, what they decided to collect, what matters most to them. You’re representing yourself and your collection.”

This is something that Thorington understands on a fundamental level and has carried with him through the years. It has given him an appreciation for the physical construction of an album. “Album art is definitely important,” he said. “I’m big on liner notes. I love when they have good packaging, a gatefold edition, lyric sleeves. Bring all that stuff on.”

And also, it lends him an ear for the way the vinyl itself is produced. “The record format will continue to influence music in the way it’s created,” Thorington said. “When you’re limited to one song versus having the expanse of a whole album, it changes the dynamic that you bring to the studio. It makes you care about how your album tells a story. Each song should be able to stand on its own, like the line of a poem, but it’s not a poem unless they all work together.”

It also gives Thorington a unique bird’s-eye perspective on the music industry itself, and the reason why vinyl continues to be viable and collectible and beloved.

“You can see it as an investment in multiple ways,” Thorington said. “It’s an emotional investment. And maybe that investment will result in your building a fondness for that album in a different way. It can also be a financial investment. They’ve always come back, and they’ve only been shown to rise. Tapes came and went. CDs came and went. Spotify’s here… but we’re still selling records.”

Which is how Thorington and Alchemy Records brings an old-age medium like vinyl into the present. One part record shop owner, one part music historian, and one part conversational curator, Thorington knows the importance of older people talking with younger people about music.

“Kids have unlimited access today,” he said. “They hear it all. They have all this music knowledge, and I can put it in a framework. I am obsessed with music history. I can put that into this tether. That’s where that knowledge that you have fits into this place. You have to talk to people. That’s the most Bobby thing I’ve ever said. To me, that’s really important.”

To have coffee and talk to Thorington about all things music, check out Alchemy Records and Red Bud Roasters at 169 S. LBJ, open Wednesday through Saturday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and on Sundays from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. You can also check out the shop online at alchemyrecordshop.com, but going in person is much more fun.

“Tapes came and went. CDs came and went. Spotify’s here... but we’re still selling records.”

– Walter Thorington