The largest music store in Texas — by its own count, though nobody has stepped up to argue — doesn’t sit in Austin, and it doesn’t sit in Deep Ellum. It sits on the service road of Highway 360 in Grand Prairie, in an unassuming building between Dallas and Fort Worth, and it holds more than a quarter million pieces of recorded music. Forever Young Records has spent four decades becoming a store collectors fly in for, and most of North Texas still drives right past it.
The scale takes a minute to process. Eleven thousand square feet of vinyl, CDs, cassettes, music DVDs, 8-tracks, and reel-to-reel tape, plus turntables, posters, and T-shirts. The origin story is pure Texas hustle: a booth at Traders Village in the 1980s, then a storefront in Irving, then the current location just north of Mayfield Road, where Highway 360 splits Arlington and Grand Prairie and funnels in customers from every direction. On a weekend the aisles hold veteran crate diggers, teenagers buying their first setup, and everyone in between.
What separates Forever Young from a warehouse is curation. The genre coverage goes deep where it counts — jazz, soul, funk, country, bluegrass, gospel, rap, disco, big band — and the Tejano and Texas music sections reflect the region in a way national chains never managed. The staff knows the floor cold. Tell them what you collect and they’ll walk you to it, then put something in your hands you didn’t come for. That expertise extends online, where the store’s Discogs shop carries more than 80,000 listings and a near-perfect seller rating built on strict, honest grading.
The loyalty runs both ways. In January 2017, a storm tore part of the roof off and rain poured onto the racks. Regular customers showed up unpaid to help dry records by hand. Stores don’t get that response by accident. They get it by being the place where, at some point, somebody found the record that changed things for them.
The staples are all here, naturally. Of course they have To Pimp a Butterfly. Of course they have Sturgill Simpson’s Metamodern Sounds in Country Music and The Kinks’ Give the People What They Want, because a store this size holds the entire canon almost as an afterthought. Anyone hunting a wanted-but-findable record will walk out satisfied. The import bins go further, pulling in pressings from the UK, Germany, Mexico, and beyond. And audiophiles chasing those plastic-wrapped Japanese pressings of the old reliables — the editions collectors swear sound the way vinyl was meant to — should ask at the counter, because if any store in North Texas has one filed away, it’s this one.
From the ’60s racks came Gale Garnett Sings About Flying & Rainbows & Love & Other Groovy Things, a 1967 RCA Victor pressing still factory sealed. Garnett won a Grammy for her 1964 hit “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine”; a sealed copy of this album, nearly sixty years old, is the sort of thing collectors mark on a want list and rarely cross off.
The American songbook crowd is covered, too. Sitting in the vocal section was Larry Kert Sings, a 1957 Epic LP still in its original cellophane, cut the same year Kert originated the role of Tony in West Side Story on Broadway. He was the first voice to sing “Maria” in front of a paying audience, and here he is on wax from that exact moment, filed in a bin in Grand Prairie next to the crooners and the cast recordings. For anyone who cares about the standards and the people who defined them, that’s a pull worth the drive by itself.
The international section coughed up The Kindli Presents Swiss Folklore Music by the Schmid-Brothers’ Show-Band, a Swiss import with autographs on the back cover — signed somewhere in Switzerland, surfaced in Grand Prairie. The funk bins held Disco Fantasy, Coke Escovedo’s 1977 Mercury LP, sealed since its release. Escovedo — Pete’s brother, Sheila E.’s uncle — has been a collector target for years, and clean copies don’t linger.
One more surprise for the club kids and the basement DJs: the electronic stock is enormous. More than 9,000 dance and electronic titles sit in the store’s inventory at last count, nearly 2,000 of them 12-inch singles, with house records numbering in the four figures and deep runs of downtempo, synth-pop, and experimental material. The recent arrivals tell the story — an original 1991 UK pressing of Primal Scream’s Screamadelica on Creation, a sealed Mo Wax copy of UNKLE’s Psyence Fiction, Nitzer Ebb’s Ebbhead on Mute, the industrial-strength EBM that Detroit’s first techno DJs treated as source code, and Chromatics’ Shadow on Italians Do It Better. Anyone who thinks a Grand Prairie record store begins and ends with classic rock has not flipped through these crates.
The deepest cut was Moonlight Motel by The Gun Club, pressed on pink vinyl. Jeffrey Lee Pierce’s L.A. band fused punk with blues and country in the early ’80s, years ahead of the language to describe it, and their records almost never turn up in the wild. For anyone raised on the underground, seeing one in a bin — not behind glass, not on an auction site — is the whole reason record stores exist.
Forever Young rewards time. Give it an afternoon and it gives you something back, whether that’s a fifty-year-old sealed funk record or just the reminder that a store this ambitious can still thrive on a service road in Grand Prairie.
Forever Young Records is at 2955 S. Hwy 360 in Grand Prairie, open Monday through Thursday 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., Friday and Saturday 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Sunday noon to 6 p.m. Call (972) 352-6299 or visit foreveryoungrecords.com.
