Jula in her father's basement music room, which holds the almost 10,000 vinyl records she inherited. Photo / Leah Hennel, The Washington Post
After her father died, Jula began hosting daily “listening parties” of his epic music collection. Now, nearly half a million followers tune in.
A year ago, just days after my husband Michael had died, I gave away his shoes. The boots, running sneakers and Jordans he kept on the shelves at our back door were the first things I brushed against each time I came home - a cold greeting from the empty house waiting for me. His smartwatch, still resting on our dresser, brings a similar pang when I think about the data it might hold: the steps and heartbeats of a young man who hadn’t yet succumbed to cancer.
In group counseling, we call these things “the stuff of grief” - remnants that strike at the core of our pain. Or, more hopefully, tether us to memory. For me, it’s the opened bottles of spirits on Michael’s bar cart, reminders of nights we entertained our friends; his houseplants, sprouting new shoots from the foundation he laid; the thousands of photos he took on vacation of dusky desert sunsets and crisp white beaches.
In grasping for a connection to him, I cling most desperately to those things - and search widely for the language, science and communities that might offer a salve. On social media, they often take the form of poems and personal perspectives, artwork and affirmations.
Then there is Jula (pronounced you-lah). As the holidays neared last year, she appeared in my social media feed with a prompt and poised greeting: “Welcome to another day of listening to my late father’s record collection.” The video speeds up as Jula runs her fingers along vinyl records densely packed into wooden shelves in her bedroom before randomly plucking Blondie’s 1978 Parallel Lines. The record spins on a decorative turntable as Jula nods along from her bed and then offers a short and engaging take.
“Debbie Harry is seriously so cool - her vocals are mwah,” Jula says, kissing her pinched fingers and tossing them from her lips. “She’s so laid-back yet has so much feeling in her voice.”
Since September, the 24-year-old Polish Canadian woman has held a daily “listening party” on her Instagram and TikTok pages, @soundwavesoffwax, to explore decades and genres of music that her father, Richard, loved - punk, disco, pop, jazz, techno, new wave and ‘60s psych rock. The project has exploded online, resonating with more than 460,000 followers combined so far - and she still has nearly 10,000 records to go.
“I hope to listen to them all,” Jula told me on a blistering winter day from her home in Alberta. “This has been such a beautiful experience for me sonically and emotionally.” Jula spoke to The Washington Post on the condition that only her first name be used out of concern for her safety. Her last name has not been publicised.
Review series such as Jula’s are far from monolithic in 2025. Nor are vinyl records, which now outsell CDs. But Jula views her page as a grieving project above all - a welcome detour amid our doomscrolling, where music buffs, casual browsers and the bereaved connect over loss, memory and the role of music in emotional healing.
“The community has been everything that I wanted from this project,” Jula said. Scroll through her comment section, and you’ll find followers sharing stories of the music and objects linking them to their loved ones. Musicians or their surviving family members thank Jula for excavating their work. Audiophiles offer their own analyses and insights about rare gems in her possession.
And they love Jula. Her casual, cool charm draw comparisons to 1980s MTV VJ Martha Quinn, while her quirks and Gen Z sensibilities disarm the most discerning music purists. Fans are quick to forgive her blunders (like the time she mispronounced David Byrne’s last name as “By-run”), chuckle at her endearing admissions (she first heard Funkytown watching Shrek 2) and remain mostly patient as she learns how to care for her vinyls. Just days into the series, Jula recalls, she ditched her aesthetically pleasing but audio-challenged Urban Outfitters record player for a professional Technics turntable after followers decried that she was “ruining” her records.
Lively and playful visuals animate Jula’s videos: little figurines gingerly placed on the centre of spinning records; regular cameos from her cat, Przemyslowa; her eclectic wardrobe and graphic T-shirts, sometimes worn inside out and backward (because the tags feel like “a little necklace,” she said); and the props that tease her reflections to come. Such as the spa robe and cucumber slices she dons while listening to a pan flute album. Or the straw dangling from her mouth during a twangy guitar record.
A musician herself, Jula exudes a natural ease and language in her reviews, balancing thoughtful introspection with youthful enthusiasm. “A low-fi aesthetic with really nice sonic textures and syncopated rhythms,” she said of a techno record from her own collection, which she occasionally plays as a parallel to the series. “I find the mood of this album to perfectly match the solstice - it’s kind of darker, and there’s some really interesting creativity happening within such a concise sound world.”
Other reviews feel like a window into her journey of grief and discovery. “A heartful farewell with lots of gratitude. His voice sounded especially vulnerable in this one,” Jula says in her video for Pacific Ocean Blue by Dennis Wilson.
“You could hear his voice straining, which added to the overall emotion. The pacing of the song really taking its time - a single wave crashing in the ocean.”
As both a musician and literature teacher, Richard was always listening for poetry in music, Jula said of her father. He loved discovering his favourite artist’s favourite artists, was particularly drawn to singer-songwriters and wrote music of his own. He wanted to be a DJ, she said, and would make CD mixtapes for his friends and often play his accordion at weddings and the local Polish hall. When Jula’s parents had guests over for dinner, the evening always reached the same finale: Someone steering the conversation to music and Richard running downstairs to grab a record or two or three to play. From there, he would prattle on about the songs’ craft, tracing the influence and history of their sound.
“He was always talking about music. My whole life it’s always been the number-one thing we connected [over] or even talked about,” Jula said. “I’d be, like, 8 years old, and he would be reading me lyrics and [explaining] a double entendre. … When I got older, I started showing him music that I liked, and we just continued that for the rest of his life.”
When Richard died a few years ago in his 50s, Jula knew that she wanted to have his records - a collection he had begun as a boy, earning money doing small jobs for neighbours. Most of the vinyls were packed in boxes or held by relatives and friends before Jula slowly brought them all home. She spent two weeks alphabetising the collection, but it would take years for her to process their meaning in her life now.
“After he passed, I did not do anything with the records - like, I didn’t even enter that [music] room for a while,” she said. “I was really lucky to have them in my mom’s house, where they could just sit there so I didn’t have to think about it right away.”
But when Jula moved back into her childhood home in April, she chose to stay in Richard’s music room - where shelves of records tower over her bed and cat tree (“I have no dust allergies, thankfully,” she said).
Eventually, she started listening to the music again, choosing a different record to play each morning and realising how much she missed having someone to talk to about it. That’s when a friend suggested she make a social media page, certain it would connect with “a couple of people” interested in her commentary.
Instead, 14 million people would watch her first post. “What an incredible gift he left for you,” one commenter wrote. “You get to follow in his sonic footsteps and will be able to have the same visceral experience he may have had when the needle hits the groove for each of those records.”
Sometimes the music stirs a swirl of emotions, tears or tender moments for Jula: a tribute song to fathers. Or an album with a considerable amount of scratches. (“It’s like a little footprint of him,” she said.) Most often they are records tied to her strongest memories - her voice cracking as she spoke about her father’s love for Paul Simon or falling silent as she paid tribute to the late Kris Kristofferson in September.
“That video was probably the most difficult video for me to film. That’s why I didn’t really talk much,” Jula said. “I grew up listening to his music, and that was just really emotional for me.”
For as much as she knows about her father’s love for music and his dad-rock classics, Jula’s listening journey still finds ways to surprise her. Every now and then, she finds a zany or eclectic record tucked into the shelves: an album full of corny jokes, a compilation of Coca-Cola jingles, a Jan and Dean Batman-inspired record with surf songs and sound effects that play out like an audio comic book. When she pulls out those records, she wonders whether she’s discovering one of her dad’s guilty pleasures and imagines how he might have listened to it quietly at night.
In a noisy era of streaming libraries, trendy headphones and smart shuffles, music listening and discovery have become solitary practices. But the music she can hold in her hand, Jula says, invites her to pause and fully engage with the experience. Whether she’s crocheting or working on a puzzle, it’s when she flips a record or hears the subtle interruptions caused by the scratches and physicality of the album that she’s reminded to reconnect with the music - and with her father.
In that way, @soundwavesoffwax feels like an act of preservation, Jula said, of both her father’s memory and sharing music as he always intended: for thousands to hear.
“In a way, I’m doing that for him and with him, which is, like, the most beautiful way for me to process this,” she said. “His spirit is holding me in this time, and is just cheering and dancing with what I’m doing with what he has left.”
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