Incomplete Song
Music was always on at home, but I don’t recall it being my choice until one day my mom took me to a music store and said “You can pick 2 cassettes for your birthday” - you see, I was also going to get a Walkman on my birthday, even though I didn’t know it at the time. I remember looking up and seeing a wall filled with tapes. My eyes might have been so big, as the lady at the counter asked if I needed some help. She picked a few tapes that were seemingly popular with children, according to her, and began playing them. I thought they were stupid. I was browsing through some of the shelves while one of the tapes was playing, and saw a Michael Jackson cassette. I remembered seeing him in a movie (Moonwalker), which I really liked back then. It was ‘Off the Wall’. Next to it, I picked ‘The Simpsons sing the Blues’. However, the MJ’s cassette must have been on sale, because I also got ‘Thriller’.
Not long after I had my Walkman my dad managed to upgrade our audio system, which meant getting an actual audio system instead of the good old multi-purposed radio we had since before I was even born. Anyways, that meant the old radio was now something for me to play around with, bringing life to my new hobby: recording songs from the radio.
From that moment, I became obsessed with listening and discovering new music - I was already studying music for several years, and had this hunger for trying to decipher the chords and melodies (even though I mostly failed). Probably, on my 2nd high-school year I listened to Metallica for the first time. Green Day and The Offspring followed. I didn't have money to buy albums, so I relied on the good will of many of my friends to lend me their cassettes, or CDs, to listen to anything new. In exchange, they could borrow my radio mixes - thinking back, those were quite alright, even though you could find a song from Deep Purple and right after…Smash Mouth.
Empty shoe boxes began piling up with mix tapes. Most of them were themed and sorted by genre, or mood, plus I only had a certain number of boxes available and had to pretty much “play Tetris” for them to fit within the sorting system.
The task of making these mix tapes wasn’t easy with the old radio. Plus, I was also borrowing CDs from friends. Therefore, my dad agreed to allow me to use the audio system. 1 CD tray, and 2 cassette compartments. I could record in 1 tape songs from other tapes and CDs at the same time. My true powers were unleashed!
Countless of hours were spent hooked up to the audio system, juggling tapes back and forth. It required finesse, stopping right after the fade and before the next song would start, creating a seamless experience. And not get me started on the 'selection process’ to decide which songs were good enough to be mixed in. Many times a tape had to be re-recorded to fix ‘imperfections’ between the tracks or replace songs that didn’t actually fit the mood of the tape quite well.
Naturally, some tapes would eventually wear out after a while and the quality of the music greatly diminished. There was a certain mix I really liked and listen to it all the time. In it, there was one song (by Green Day) that had a glitch at a certain time, causing the tape to 'jump' forward and skip a few seconds. The song remained incomplete, and I could not re-record it as the owner of the album wasn't a friend anymore. It bothered me a lot at times, but with time I was accustomed to it and it became normal. Time helped cover things up, and as months (even years) passed, the complete original song was forgotten.
Life has many ‘glitches’ sometimes, makes us jump hours, days, months, forward. Even years. However, the choice is always ours. We decide whether the tape should remain broken or fixed. Hopefully, some songs will no longer remain incomplete.
