Liner Notes From the Twelfth Floor: My Complete Discography of Elevator Rides

It started, as most of my projects do, with a long wait and a short temper. I was standing in the lobby of a dentist's office in Sacramento — the kind of building that smells like carpet bought in bulk — watching the floor numbers crawl past inside a brass box, when a Muzak rendition of "Girl from Ipanema" drifted down and landed on my head like a soft, unpaid fine.

And I thought: this deserves an album cover.

Not the song. The elevator. The whole experience. The held breath, the mirrored walls, the stranger pretending to study their shoes like the shoes owed them money. Every elevator ride is a tiny concept album with no album art. So I made the art.

The Archive of Vertical Listening

The rules were simple, which is the only kind of rule I follow. For every elevator I could remember riding in my life — currently forty-three — I would design a full LP sleeve. Hand-drawn cover. Tracklist. Liner notes. A fictional artist name plausibly connected to the building. No re-dos, no fixes, no pretending the third-grade dentist's office elevator deserved better than what I gave it.

The result is a discography of my entire vertical life, pressed on imaginary vinyl, filed in a shoebox labeled RISES & FALLS: THE COMPLETE WORKS.

Some highlights from the catalog:

• "Lobby Music for the Lobby-Minded" by The Brass Box Trio — my aunt's condo in Boca, gold walls, a fan that clicked like a metronome. The sleeve is all sunset gradients and a palm tree that looks like it's been through something.
• "Freight of Feeling" by Load Limit & the Weight Sensors — the freight elevator at my first art-supply job. Grunge typography. A tracklist where every song is just "Capacity (I)." "Capacity (II)." "Capacity (Reprise)."
• "Please Stand Clear" by The Doors — yes, I know. I'm not proud. I'm also not deleting it.
• "Thirteen Floors of Nothing" by The Missing Button — the parking garage elevator in Chicago that skipped 13 and, I swear, briefly skipped 7. The cover is entirely black ink with one small, nervous dot.

Elevators Are America's Most Underrated Listening Rooms

Here's the thesis I didn't plan on arriving at: we have been sleeping on the elevator as a venue. Think about it. Acoustically, it's a padded cell with better lighting. Socially, it's the only room in America where strangers agree to a minute of enforced, silent intimacy. Emotionally, it's a phone booth in reverse — you go in ordinary and come out on a different floor of yourself.

No streaming service has ever curated for this. Spotify has playlists for focusing, for grieving, for pretending you're in a European café. There is no playlist called You Are Currently Rising at 200 Feet Per Minute With a Man Holding a Filing Cabinet. The gap in the market is staggering.

So each sleeve comes with liner notes that treat the ride like a listening session. For my grandmother's assisted-living facility: "Side B plays best while descending slowly, holding a casserole dish, thinking about your mother." For the hotel in Vegas with the mirrored ceiling: "Recommended playback volume: none. This album is a lie you tell with your eyes."

What the Sleeves Taught Me

Two things, unexpectedly.

First: memory is stored in floor numbers. I couldn't tell you what I did most Tuesdays last year, but I can tell you the elevator at my junior high smelled like pencil shavings and dread, and that its doors closed with the confidence of a judge's gavel. Drawing sleeve number nineteen — "Dismissed at Three" by The Buzzer — brought it all back in a way a journal never has.

Second: constraint is a better collaborator than freedom. Every sleeve had to be done in one sitting, in ink, based on a building that mostly no longer exists. That limitation is what made them good. If I could redo them, they'd be worse. This is a lesson I learn approximately every nine months and forget by the next nine.

The Gallery (And Where This Is Going)

I've hung twelve of the best sleeves in the hallway of my apartment, in chronological order of ride, which means my guests now walk a timeline of my life in vertical transportation. My landlord thinks it's "an art thing." It is an art thing. It is also a shrine to the observation that we spend years of our lives in small moving rooms and never once thank them.

The full collection of forty-three is headed to a small gallery show this fall — real frames, fake vinyl, one working button that plays a two-second elevator chime I composed myself and refuse to apologize for.

Until then, a request: next time the doors open, step in and listen. Really listen. Somewhere in that hum and lurch and dinged chime is an album nobody's drawn yet.

Somebody should. Maybe you. Maybe sleeve forty-four is yours.