More often than not, Ally O’Neil can be found surrounded by a few thousand records. “Music is the reason I wake up every day,” she says. “Other than my friends and family, there’s nothing [else] I really care about.” Her ever growing personal archive is dominated by jazz and blues, soul and funk, gospel and 80s hits—but her passion goes beyond collecting. At 24, O’Neil is the first resident D.J. at Living Room, the private members’ club in Los Angeles that, since discreetly opening its doors in October 2024, has hosted performers from the singer Beck to the D.J. Prospa and the comedian Fred Armisen.
For O’Neil, it all began at age 12, with a Hank Williams record she picked up from a local store in her hometown of Bend, Oregon, using her babysitting money. “I got the bug,” she says. “I didn’t have a lot of friends growing up, so music was my escape and my records were my friends.”
At 15, O’Neil was scouted and signed as a model to the now shuttered agency MP, soon transitioning to State Management. “I ended up dropping out of high school and doing online classes because I was getting picked on,” she recalls. After another year in Oregon, she packed up her records and moved to California to model full-time. “It helped me connect with music on a level I don’t think I would have otherwise,” she says about living alone in an unfamiliar city.
During her free time, she continued collecting albums, working her way through record shops—usually Atomic, in Burbank, and Freakbeat, in Sherman Oaks—and weekend fairs. She also read about music and interviewed artists she admired, like the saxophonist Azar Lawrence, for publications such as In Sheep’s Clothing, a Web site devoted to vinyl and analog culture. Soon she was working seven days a week, assisting at the music label New Community when she wasn’t on a photo shoot.
Her first job as a D.J. came at 21—as soon as was legally allowed—with a residency at Bar Stella, in Silver Lake. It wasn’t easy breaking into the industry as a young woman. “They do have a club,” she says about the music community’s old guard. “They welcome the young men and build them up.” It only made her try harder. “I kind of implied that I knew more than I did,” O’Neil admits about that first role. “That’s how you figure it out—you just do it. It started picking up and somehow became my full-time job.”
Now she’s Living Room’s sole vinyl handler, or the only person trusted to touch their records, pulling from the nearly 10,000-piece collection lining the wall behind the D.J. booth. Before the club opened in Hollywood, “they wanted someone with over 10 years of experience handling vinyl, and someone who could talk with people, and talk about music,” O’Neil says. “I was like, Hell, yeah—that’s me.” She had one interview with the team and was hired right away.
Most evenings, O’Neil spends hours pulling together hundreds of her own records to supplement sets. (That’s about 200 pounds she carries up and down the stairs of her building. This, she says, is one of the reasons she quit drinking last year.) She never plans what she’ll play in advance. Often, right before heading out the door, she grabs whatever she’s in the mood for and feels out the night, reading the room as she goes. “If I can see something is working, I’ll keep it in that zone.”
O’Neil barely knows how to use C.D.J.’s, a media player mixing digital files that has become the industry standard. Instead, she works exclusively with vinyl, a unique skill that requires extensive knowledge amassed over years. “Once I find something I love, I make it everything,” she says.
Her closest friends are now the musicians she once read about, like the saxophonist Tom Scott and the Blue Note Records producer Joe Harley, from whom she learned Transcendental Meditation. Given her tastes and her rejection of mainstream music over its lack of soul, some might say O’Neil was born into the wrong generation. But maybe she’s exactly where she’s meant to be: bridging the scene of the past with one that honors those who paved the way.
Check Out O’Neil’s Custom Playlist for Air Mail
Anna Jube is a Los Angeles–based writer