It doesn’t get much more hipster than a store that is camouflaged by some of the most hipster stores in Omaha. Within walking distance of Creighton’s campus, tucked between Film Streams (Omaha’s trademark hipster theater) and American Apparel, the Saddle Creek Shop attracts music lovers from all over the country.
Naturally, I needed to check it out for myself. I snagged an interview with one of the managers and discovered a lot about the neighborhood vinyl shop.
Originally solely a record label, Saddle Creek Records has signed acts such as Bright Eyes, Cursive, The Faint, The Rural Alberta Advantage and Tokyo Police Club, just to name a few.
The store officially opened last June for a place artists could visit, according to Nate Welker, Saddle Creek Shop’s warehouse manager and joint manager of the shop.
“The store would allow us a way for people to come in from out of town and see everything,” Welker said. “In order
to make that more interesting to people, we had the idea to add the archival sort of things.”
One piece in the shop, the original artwork from the cover of Bright Eyes’ album “Fevers and Mirrors,” gets an exceptional amount of attention.
“The artist cut a hole in his basement wall and brought the actual dry wall here,” Welker says.
While the album art is impressive, the Saddle Creek Shop is not a museum by any means.
“We are a record label … I kind of look at [the shop] as another spoke of what we do. We also own a screen-printing company that screen prints pretty much all of our stuff,” Welker said.
Products offered at the store include CDs from the signed artists, nearly every indie vinyl album you could want to buy and T-shirts printed by their screen-printing company.
The Saddle Creek Shop also offers events regularly that provide an outlet for music buffs and fans from the area. The first of these two events is called “Record Club @ Shop.”
“In the age of digital music, music is so readily available, so ubiquitous that people don’t stop and listen to music anymore,” Welker said. “What we wanted to do was create an event that set aside a chunk of time for people to come together and just listen to a record and talk to people about the record, just like old times.”
Record Club @ Shop meets on Tuesdays at 7 p.m., and it’s open to any and all that are interested.
Also open to the public, Songs @ Shop will feature a new artist/musical group playing an acoustic show on the first
Saturday of each month.
“It’s super casual, all acoustic, people bringing their guitars and playing songs. People can come in and shop or stop and watch. It gives us a reason to be open one Saturday a month,” Welker said.
Normally, the Saddle Creek Shop’s hours are Monday through Friday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. They are only open for Saturday on the first weekend of the month, so if Saturday is your only free day make sure you look at your calendar before coming in to fratrenize with your fellow hipsters.
Walking into the shop, it was easy to see the variety in genre and artists in the records. From Jay-Z and Tyler the Creator to country, folk music, electronic and dance, Saddle Creek Shop has something for every kind of hipster.
The musically naïve may ask:
“Why buy vinyl?”
“Sound quality and collectability,” Welker said. “There can be many different versions of the same record; it’s kind of like Pokémon, you gotta catch ‘em all.”