Time & Perspective Quote by Jeff Ament

Ament’s line is a quiet flex disguised as format nerdery: the point isn’t just that vinyl “sounds way better,” it’s that the band now has the leverage to insist on it. The first record arriving without a vinyl edition reads like a small indignity from an era when artists, especially on their way up, took what the industry handed them. “Being in a position” is the tell. It’s power, negotiated and earned, reframed as audiophile preference so it doesn’t sound like a grievance.

The subtext is also about memory-making. Vinyl isn’t merely a playback medium; it’s an artifact you can shelve, lend, hunt for, and ritualize. Saying the first record didn’t come out on vinyl implies a missing chapter in the band’s physical history, like a hometown photo album that never got printed. This time, they’re correcting the archive and controlling how the work is experienced.

And that last sentence, plainspoken and almost stubborn, lands as a cultural counterargument to frictionless streaming. “It sounds way better” is less a technical claim than a statement of values: attention over convenience, texture over compression, commitment over endless scroll. Coming from a veteran of rock’s analog-to-digital whiplash, it’s also a reminder that “better” often means “more intentional.” Vinyl becomes a proxy for authorship itself: not just making songs, but deciding the conditions under which they live.