Elevated Music will soon celebrate its one-year anniversary.
Owner Bill Haggerty opened the Cloverdale record shop last August. He said he wants to thank the local community and all his customers for their support over the past year. To show that appreciation, he’s throwing a one-year anniversary celebration Aug. 14.
He and wife Jen Haggerty are encouraging people to check out the store that day.
“Make sure to come by for our one-year,” said Jen. “We’re going to have a big sale. We’ll have cake. We might even have some live music.”
“We have lots of new arrivals, stuff we’ve been stashing just for the day,” added Bill. “We’ll have lots of cool new and used records hitting the floor. It’ll be a great day of music, community, and culture.”
He said some of those records will be from more popular bands, but added there’ll also be records available from some obscure artists too.
Looking back, Bill said his first year in business exceeded all expectations.
“The music community is really supportive of what we’re doing,” he said. “Elevated’s been around for a decade before I opened the store last year. We’ve just been rockin’ it since then.”
Bill said he always wanted to open up a record store and an opportunity arose during the pandemic. But he wasn’t sure what that would mean for his then fledgling shop.
“The community support during the pandemic was amazing,” Bill said. “It was always a risk opening during the pandemic, but it’s been great. We’ve been really surprised at how the community has turned out in support.”
He said over the past year he’s seen an elevated interest in music. He said customers tell him they are rediscovering both a love of music and a love of collecting. And many are rediscovering their own old, sometimes dusty, music collections.
Bill explained that anyone who comes to Elevated will find a “cool record store” and feel some “great vibes” when they enter the premises. He said it’s a “musician’s store” owned by musicians.
Bill’s been playing drums since he was 10 years old. He created Elevated Music in 2011, the same year he got his audio engineering and music production degree.
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He runs the production side of Elevated from his home studio, making music with and for both local and international artists for more than a decade. Some of his production credits include work with Big Shug and Gang Starr, including a recent credit on Big Shug’s 2019 album, the Diamond Report.
He’s had several highlights over the past year at the record shop, but by far the greatest has been running it with his wife Jen and getting back into music production after a major pandemic slow-down.
“Doing what we love is the main thing,” he said. “It doesn’t feel like work when you do what you love.”
Jen said Record Store Day was a big highlight for her over the past year. The biannual event—usually held on Black Friday and a Saturday in April, but shifted a bit in 2020 and 2021 because of COVID—celebrates and supports independent record shops. There are often special pressings created specifically for Record Store Day which include unreleased albums and rare-to-find records.
“We had a big lineup, about 40 people,” noted Jen. “People get really excited about what records will be released.”
She said the recent Record Store Day (held in July this year) was a little icing on the cake as they neared their first-year anniversary.
“It was really great to see it all unfold,” she explained. “To put this place together after it had been a plan for so long, to finally make it happen in the middle of all the craziness, is something special.”
Jen encourages anyone who is into vinyl, cassettes, or CDs to come down to Cloverdale and check out Elevated Music.
“It’s worth the drive, no matter where you live,” she said. “We’ve got something for everyone. Our stock covers any genre you can think of.”
Elevated has about 10,000 records on hand, but even if they don’t have something specific in stock, Jen said she can order it in. The shop also buys and sells cassettes, records, and CDs.
Elevated Music is located at 17684 57 Avenue in Cloverdale. The shop can be found online at elevatedmusic.ca, on Instagram at elevatedmusicshop, and on Facebook at ElevatedMusicOfficial.
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