Once, when I was an impressionable teen music nerd barreling through the canon of rock classics, I picked Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark up at my favorite record store. When I got home to play the CD, I heard what in retrospect sounded like a live Phish show. I brought it back and played it for the guys, who, confused as I was, exchanged it for a normal copy. I thought nothing of it again until this weekend, as a slew of Lana del Rey fans are having a similar experience.It seems that certain single LP copies of the pop chanteuse's 2012 debut Born to Die were pressed up with the Baltimore dream pop / shoegaze band Wildhoney's (great) debut album Sleep Through It instead in what Gordon Dufresne of Deranged Records, the label that released Wildhoney's record in January, described to Baltimore City Paper as a "mix up with the stampers at the plant… small mistake with huge implications." Dufresne notes that since the switcheroo effected the entire pressing, there are likely many more of these in circulation. So tread lightly with those Born to Die single LP pressings… or happy hunting for your rare misprint. As vinyl continues to enjoy a resurgence in popularity among music diehards despite pressing plants' perennial struggle to keep up, more issues like this can't be far off.The mistake was first uncovered in a post on the Vinyl Collective forum, where a member who goes by "Rottengoth" excitedly detailed picking up the Lana record at a Hot Topic but getting a earful of "this REALLY good shoegaze band" instead. Rottengoth played a bit of his copy of Born to Die on YouTube, and it's definitely Sleep Through It's loud, tart opener "Fall In." (See below.) He ended up keeping his, but another buyer who pointed out the faux pas is thinking differently. Why couldn't my teenage music buying mishap turn out this well?
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