Ear X-Tacy amongst Paste Magazine’s 17 Coolest Record Stores

Paste is giving a lot of Louisville to Louisville in this month’s issue.  First, they put My Morning Jacket on the cover, and then they list Ear X-Tacy as amongst the “the 17 Coolest Record Stores in America.” Paste prefaces the article like this:

People are no longer leaving their houses. They are content to wirelessly import digital music straight into nano-engineered storage devices implanted in their grey matter, and the digital revolution is killing brick-and-mortar retail. But, to paraphrase Mark Twain, rumors of the record store’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Just as people of faith need houses of worship in which to commune, music zealots are no less dependent on shrines dedicated to their own decibel-cranked passion. For that reason, Paste hereby celebrates the record store, bestowing superlatives on a few of America’s finest. May they live long and loud!

With particular reference to Ear X-Tacy, here’s what they had to say:

Best Place to Find Cool Bumper Stickers for the Outside of Your Car, and CDs for the Inside – At a time when indie record stores were dropping off the map, John Timmons decided he needed to move into a building big enough to need its own map. Ear X-tacy grew from the 500-square-foot store it was in 1985 into the 10,000-square-foot music wonderland it is today. With countless listening stations and riveting in-store performances, the shop puts a high premium on musical discovery

The list is in no particular order, so I’ll venture to imagine that they would have liked to have put Ear X-Tacy first.

• Amoeba Records, Los Angeles, CA
• Criminal Records, Atlanta, GA
• Other Music, New York City
• Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art, Clarksdale, MS
• Waterloo Records, Austin, TX
• Aquarius Records, San Francisco, CA
• Dusty Groove America, Chicago, IL
• Ernest Tubb Record Shop, Nashville, TN
• Shangri-La Records, Memphis, TN
• Music Millennium, Portland, OR
• Ear X-Tacy, Louisville, KY
• Louisiana Music Factory, New Orleans, LA
• Newbury Comics, Boston, MA
• Grimey’s New + Pre-Loved Music, Nashville, TN
• Turntable Lab, New York City
• The Electric Fetus, Minneapolis, MN
• Jerry’s Records, Pittsburgh, PA