Play the right four bars and you’re somewhere else entirely. Not remembering the place. There. The light, the temperature, who was next to you, what the air smelled like. A song can do in two seconds what a photograph never quite manages, which is put you back inside your own body on a day that’s otherwise gone.

I’ve got a handful of these, and I suspect you do too.

Over the Rhine will always be a hospital room. My daughter, brand new, smaller than seemed possible, and that band’s warm, worn-in Ohio ache filling the space while my whole life quietly reorganized itself around a person who’d existed for about an hour. I can’t hear Karin Bergquist’s voice without smelling that room.

boygenius is an A-frame in the mountains outside Chattanooga. Life had been unpredictable for a few years by the time we went. The Covid stretch had rearranged everything, so we drove up into the trees to breathe. Their debut had landed just weeks earlier, and the drive was the first time we really let it play. Once we started, we could not stop. That record still hands the whole trip back to me: the pitched ceiling, the red wine, the cedar hot tub on the deck where we sat for hours looking out over the valley while everything finally went quiet.

The Japanese House is a July drive to St. Louis to see friends over the Fourth, a couple of summers back. Windows down, that shimmery synth-pop doing its thing, the specific optimism of a road trip toward people you love. Amber Bain built a whole mood for a weekend I didn’t know I’d want to keep.

And Dido, of all people, is the English countryside. I was on a college fine arts trip, riding through green I’d only seen in movies, and “No Angel” was somehow the tape that fit. Ask me to defend it musically and I’ll get shifty. Ask me where it takes me and I’m nineteen and jet-lagged and certain the whole world is about to open up.

None of these are arguments about the best music. They’re coordinates. Little pins dropped on a map only I can read, and each song is the pin.

Which brings me to the one that isn’t light.

A little over nine years ago, my grandfather died. He was a great man, the kind who builds something real and gets quietly respected by everybody who works near him. Three things I’ll always keep: he loved to laugh, he always had a good-sounding stereo, and he loved his Breyers coffee ice cream.

He even officiated my wedding.

Afterward, my wife and I lived in a little house he owned, just down the street from the house my dad grew up in, and I’d wander over all the time. We’d sit on his front porch and talk about God and money and how to be a decent human. He was a serious businessman, and I didn’t clock it at the time, but a lot of those porch conversations were planting the first seeds of me wanting to run something of my own one day.

I’ll never forget asking if he would chip in and help us with the down payment on our first house. He was glad to. But he also wrote up a contract, told me he’d charge interest if we didn’t honor the terms, and made it unmistakable that this was not a handout. He meant business. Even with his own grandkid.

Then, after a long fight, he was gone. I flew up to New York to honor him alongside hundreds of other people who felt the same way about him.

The morning of the funeral, I was lying in the guest bed at my parents’ place, not remotely ready to start what I knew would be a long, heavy day. So I did what I always do. I reached for my headphones and started scrolling artist names, hunting for something that could meet the moment. I landed on an album I’d had in heavy rotation since 2012: Land of the Living, by the Nashville songwriter Matthew Perryman Jones.

I lay there and let it carry me, words and melodies I already knew cold. And then the last track came on, the title track, and that song, in that particular room on that particular morning, opened a door I wasn’t ready for. The drums and guitars and strings climb and climb, and Matthew sings out in that voice of his, fragile and enormous at the same time, “I am coming home.”

I fell apart. Wept like a baby in that guest bed. (I’m a little misty typing it, honestly.) Something in the sound and the words in that exact moment wrapped all the way around me and would not let go. To this day I cannot get through that song without ending up a puddle. You want to talk about a song stamping a place onto you? It doesn’t get stronger than this one for me.

I am coming home.

I’ll let the theologians sort out what “home” finally is. But whatever it turns out to be, wherever it is, I’m counting on seeing my grandpa there. And maybe we’ll put the song on, kick back with a couple pints of coffee ice cream, and let it stamp one more place onto both of us.

Picked Up

Easy call this issue. I want you to hear Land of the Living by Matthew Perryman Jones. Put it on with headphones, somewhere you won't be interrupted, and turn it up. Let the whole thing build. If you've got a place it wants to take you, let it.

And then, if you want to see where it came from, there’s this.

A few years back, SerialBox filmed the band making this record at a studio out in Round Top, Texas. It’s a short, quiet little thing, the songs coming together in the room, and watching it after you’ve sat with the album is its own kind of gift. The holy version first. The how-it-was-built version second, for anyone who wants to stay a while.

In the Room

This one ran heavier and more personal than usual, so it feels off to pivot into something clever I’m working on. Instead I’ll just use this space to say thank you for reading Tape Hiss.

The texts and emails and messages people have sent about this little letter have meant more than I know how to put down here. Starting something new right now is a strange thing to attempt. Attention is scattered a thousand ways, and there are roughly a billion other things any of you could be doing with these few minutes. That you spend them here, that some of you write back, genuinely gets me. Thank you.

Sent Out

So. Your turn.

What song hands you a place? Not your favorite song. The one that opens a door, that drops you back into a room, a car, a coastline you thought you’d left behind. Maybe it’s a happy one. Maybe it’s the one you can’t quite get through.

Hit reply and tell me the song and the place it takes you. I read every single one.

Chad

p.s. — I’ve known this part for years. It only rearranged itself while I was writing this.

The album’s called Land of the Living, and Matthew Perryman Jones took that title from a letter Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo. Van Gogh tells him that the hours the two of them spent together had at least made them both sure they were still, in his words, in the land of the living. I’d known that backstory long before that morning in the guest bed.

What I’d never connected was the timing. I grabbed that record blind, off a half-awake scroll through my library, on the worst morning of that whole year. And the thing I reached for by pure instinct turned out to be named after a line about the plain comfort of still having the person you love within reach. I knew the story. I just didn’t see, until later, that the song had known where it was taking me before I did.

There’s a conversation I’ve been carrying around for thirty years, and I can still hear every word of it.

I was a freshman or sophomore in high school, standing in a hot, humid church with a woman from our congregation. She was kind. I want that on the record, because she stays kind for this entire story. She asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I lit up and handed her the whole plan: music. Playing it, recording it, living somewhere inside of it. I’d been at a piano since before I could spell, taught myself guitar, played in various churches and bands, and had recently discovered (through some creatively licensed copies of Acid Pro and Fruity Loops... real ones know) that you could build entire songs inside a computer. I could not envision a life that didn’t have all of that at the center.

She smiled and said, “That’s nice. But what are you going to do for money?”

Record screech.

I wish I could tell you I shook it off in the parking lot. Instead, I spent my twenties and thirties answering her second question. I still found my way into studios, still got to produce some things, but somewhere in there I quietly stopped calling myself a musician. The guitars went first. Then the amps and the pedals. A couple of keyboards found new friends on eBay. When I met new people, the old aspirations didn’t come up, because I’d filed them under silly. Life moved on, and one way or another, I moved on with it.

And look, I’m genuinely grateful for how it unfolded. Cool work, great people, bills paid. But there was always a low “what if” running underneath the good years, quiet and constant, sitting just beneath the surface of everything. (Longtime readers of this letter know exactly what that sound is called.)

Here’s the thing about the job I ended up doing for a living, the one that did, in fact, pay the bills. It is re-listening. I go back over the same stretch of audio ten, twenty, fifty times, and every pass turns up something the last one missed: a breath before a sentence, a shift in the room tone, one syllable sitting a decibel too hot. The entire craft is the second listen.

And a few years ago, it occurred to me that in all that time, I had never once gone back and replayed the tape of that conversation in the church.

So I did. Same room. Same heat. Same kind woman. Except this time I let the tape run from the top, and heard what I’d been listening past for twenty-some years: she asked me two questions that day. I built two decades around the second one, the one about money, the one that made a teenager question whether his identity was affordable. But the first question was still sitting right there on the recording, exactly where she left it.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

It’s the most ordinary question in the world. Every adult asks it. Chris Farley built one of the most famous characters in SNL history out of bellowing a version of it at terrified teenagers. And it turns out it’s also the better question by a mile, because “when you grow up” has no expiration date printed on it anywhere. I checked.

So I started answering it. I rebuilt the studio, and this time I built it for my clients and for me in the same room. Guitars hang on the walls again. The pedalboard is overflowing. There’s a tube amp tucked under a shelf, and analog synths that light up like a Christmas tree every time I flip them on, and somewhere in me, a fifteen-year-old grins every single time. Do I want to front a band and haul gear around the country playing shows? HELL NO. But I’m writing music again. Some of it for myself, some of it for a new podcast project. Some for an indie film I’ve been tapped to score. All of it because I finally heard the question that had been on the tape the whole time.

I’m still growing up. So, for the record, are you.

If someone forwarded this to you and it sounds like your kind of thing, you can get the next one in your inbox, every other week.

Picked Up

I’ve had the new Thundercat record, Distracted, running through my speakers since it dropped this spring, and I’m nowhere near done with it. It’s his first album in six years, and it’s stacked with friends: Tame Impala, A$AP Rocky, Lil Yachty, Channel Tres, and a posthumous Mac Miller verse on “She Knows Too Much” (love and miss you, Mac). But the track I keep circling back to is “ThunderWave,” his duet with WILLOW.

Anyone who’s talked music with me in the past year knows how hard I fell for WILLOW’s 2024 album empathogen, so hearing her voice braided into Thundercat’s falsetto over that flanged, underwater bass felt like two of my favorite working musicians finding each other on purpose.

This issue, I’m handing you two things to watch instead of one thing to hear.

First, the live performance video of “ThunderWave.” Thundercat on bass, WILLOW on guitar, and a bass solo you won’t find on the album version. Watch his hands and try to keep up.

Second, WILLOW's NPR Tiny Desk concert from a couple of years back. I've watched it more times than I can reasonably defend, and I still can't get over how tight that band sounds in a room the size of the name. There are a lot of great Tiny Desk performances. This one stays at the top of my list.

In the Room

For five years now, my studio has worked with the team at A Kids Co., the publisher behind the “A Kids Book About...” series, making books and podcasts that take kids seriously on the topics most grownups tiptoe around (racism, grief, money, all of it). Their parenting podcast, Raising Us, picked up an Ambies nomination and a Webby honoree nod along the way, and it’s one of those long partnerships where the trust is built into the workflow by now. We recently mixed an episode called “Raising Confident Kids Without Pressure or Perfection,” a conversation hosted by Elise Hu with Nia Sioux and Dr. Kristin Neff, whose research on self-compassion has quietly reshaped how a lot of parents talk to their kids (and to themselves).

We only mixed this one, no editing, which is its own quiet discipline. The conversation was already there. Our job was to make sure nothing got between it and you.

Here’s why it belongs in this particular letter. I just told you a story about what one offhand sentence from a well-meaning adult did to a kid’s sense of what he was allowed to become. Then I mixed a conversation where Nia Sioux describes being labeled the weak link on national television at nine years old, and the years she’s spent taking that label back (her new memoir is titled Bottom of the Pyramid, which tells you exactly how she chose to take it back). And Dr. Neff spends her half of the episode explaining what I wish someone had told the kid in that church: a person’s worth was never supposed to hinge on the outcome. At one point she even says that music can carry that message when words can’t quite reach. I mixed this one, but honestly, I also needed to hear it.

Sent Out

You knew this was coming.

What did you want to be when you grew up? The kid answer. The one you gave before anyone brought up money.

And then the harder half: what’s the version of that answer still available to you, right now, at whatever age you’re currently doing your growing up? It probably doesn’t look like the original. Mine sure doesn’t. But I’d bet there’s a version of it sitting closer than you think, a tape you haven’t played back in years.

Hit reply and tell me both halves. I read every one.

Chad

p.s. — One more thing about Matt Foley, because when I learned this, I had to sit down.

You know the character even if you’ve never known the name: Chris Farley on SNL, the sweaty, hollering motivational speaker warning teenagers that they’ll wind up eating a steady diet of government cheese and living in a van down by the river. It’s regularly called one of the best sketches the show ever aired.

Farley named him after a real person. Matt Foley was his rugby teammate at Marquette; they met at practice in 1982 and stayed close for the rest of Farley’s life. And the real Matt Foley grew up to become a Catholic priest. He served tours in Afghanistan as an Army chaplain, pastored parishes in Chicago, and walked with Farley through the fame and the addiction underneath it. When Farley died in 1997, it was Father Matt Foley who presided over his funeral.

The loudest version of the question in American culture, the guy screaming at kids about what they’re going to do with their lives, was named for a quiet man of the church who spent his whole life asking it gently.

This letter started in a church, with a question. It felt right to end in one.

I’ve owned a few analog synthesizers over the years, but last year I finally got my first Moog.

You know Moog, even if you think you don’t. It’s the sound sitting under a startling amount of the music you already love: the warm electronic pulse on records by Stevie Wonder, Kraftwerk, Gary Numan, and New Order, the Moog that Giorgio Moroder built the entire throbbing hum of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” out of, even the one George Harrison hauled into Abbey Road for the Beatles. Bob Moog’s instruments quietly rewired the back half of the twentieth century, and most people never learned his name.

What gives a Moog its voice is the filter. The famous Moog ladder filter, specifically, the one people always reach for the same couple of words to describe: warm, and a little creamy. For the non-gearheads, a filter is the part that sculpts a synth's tone by taking certain frequencies away. The oscillator makes a raw, buzzing, overstuffed sound, far more than you'd ever actually want, and then the filter goes to work removing what you don't need, carving and shaping until what's left is the thing you meant to hear all along. (Moog made a free, almost defiantly analog video series about exactly this. The very first lesson is about nothing but listening, and the synth on my desk turns up in it.)

Here’s the part I love, and the part this whole letter turns on. A synth filter doesn’t add anything. It only subtracts. You arrive at the beautiful sound by deciding, carefully, what to throw out. The gearheads even call it subtractive synthesis, which is a very technical name for getting to what matters by clearing away what doesn’t.

Which is a lot of philosophy to pull out of a box of oscillators, I know. I’ve been pulling it out for a year anyway.

Years ago, before I knew the quiet pleasure of working for myself in a room I built on purpose (where, yes, the Moog now lives), I worked in an office. Around other people. And whoever held the keys to that place decided it would be fun to wire speakers down the hallway and pipe in SiriusXM’s Alt Nation from ten to six. The audio gods, who have apparently nursed a grudge against me for years, made sure one of those speakers hung directly outside my door. So every working day, while trying to edit audio, I got Passion Pit and Vampire Weekend and MGMT whether I asked for them or not.

Which meant that on top of the office politics and the bad coffee and a desk chair that funneled most of my paycheck straight to my chiropractor, I spent every day doing one more invisible job: filtering out the sound I didn’t want so I could actually hear the sound I did.

These days we’ve got little HomePods scattered around the house. Not for music (the vintage McIntosh and Marantz and Klipsch handle that, and would like a word if I implied otherwise), but for the small stuff. The weather. How many hours until the next World Cup match. And, if you’re my daughter, the fast answer to a math problem she’d rather not work out herself. The trouble with a speaker that’s always listening is that it occasionally decides to join a conversation no one invited it into. The last time my parents were visiting, my dad, not clocking that a HomePod was within earshot, said a soft “I love you, Sherri” to my mom. Siri lit right up: “Oh, thank you, I love you too!”

Apple, it turns out, has been wrestling with the same problem, just from the other side. By all appearances, at their big keynote this June they quietly altered their own audio every single time a presenter said the word “Siri,” so the broadcast wouldn’t set off a few million HomePods in living rooms around the world. Engineers who pulled up the spectrogram afterward found neat little gaps notched out right around three, four, five, and six kilohertz, exactly where that word lives, exactly when it was spoken. A dynamic notch filter, in plain terms. The same move my Moog makes, aimed at a single word. It didn’t entirely work, for the record. Plenty of people still watched their phones perk up. But I love that the most-listened-to company on earth spent real engineering effort to make its devices, for once, not listen.

Three filters, then. One I rigged out of desperation in a hallway, one Apple built on purpose for a keynote, and one that’s been sitting inside synthesizers for sixty years doing the patient work of subtraction. And all of it keeps walking me back to the same question.

What would I filter out of my own days, if I got to choose the frequencies?

Start with the obvious culprits. The phone. The scroll that quietly eats an evening. The fourth episode of something I won’t remember by morning. But the frequencies I’d really want gone are the lower, sneakier ones: the worry humming under an otherwise good afternoon, the half-attention I hand the people right in front of me while some background process churns away about email. The oscillator of an ordinary day puts out so much more than I need. Most of it isn’t even bad. It’s just there, buzzing, drowning the part I’d actually choose to hear.

I keep wondering what would be left if I got better at carving it away. What I might make, or notice, or simply enjoy, with all of that turned down.

If someone forwarded this to you and it sounds like your kind of thing, you can get the next one in your inbox, every other week.

Picked Up

If you want to practice turning the noise down, it helps to have the right record for the job. Something with enough life to keep you company and enough restraint to stay out of your way, which is a far narrower lane than it sounds. Most music misses it in one direction or the other.

My pick: SOHN, “Albadas (Dawn Songs).”

SOHN spent years making meticulous, vocal-forward electronic records, and then last fall he released something different: an entirely instrumental album he wrote in the early hours of the morning, as a daily ritual, before the day could get its hands on him. You can hear those mornings in it. The whole record has the feeling of first light, unhurried and clear, with no lyric asking for your attention and no big gesture trying to win it. I’ve had it looping through more deadlines than I’ll admit to. It does the genuinely hard thing a working record has to do, which is fill a room without ever crowding it. Put it on and notice how much easier it gets to hear yourself think.

Listen: Apple · Tidal · Spotify

And if you want to watch it breathe, there’s a live performance of “Ascent” from the album that I keep returning to. It’s worth your time.

Three more, if you’d like options:

Buddy Ross, “K We’re Here.” Frank Ocean’s longtime keyboardist made his first solo record as a gift for his newborn son, and it turns out a thing built to settle a baby works just as well on a frazzled adult at three in the afternoon.

Listen: Apple · Tidal · Spotify

Hanakiv, “Interlude.” Spare, patient piano from a London-based composer who understands exactly how much silence to leave between the notes. The space is the whole point.

Listen: Apple · Tidal · Spotify

Laura Misch, “Lithic.” Saxophone, voice, and field recordings she gathered inside actual caves and quarries, somehow assembled into the most grounding thing I’ve heard all year. Strange and warm at the same time.

Listen: Apple · Tidal · Spotify

In the Room

This issue, the room is mine, and so is the Moog.

I’ve been working on a track called “So Many.” A Moog arpeggio runs underneath the whole thing, a fast, pulsing figure that never sits still, with a simple piano melody laid over the top. The arpeggio is the engine. The piano is the thing you hold onto while the engine keeps pushing forward. It builds, it opens up, it keeps moving, and there’s a little ache under all the motion that I keep finding more interesting the longer I sit with it. It’s still a sketch, just over two minutes long, the kind of thing I make to chase a feeling before I can name it.

Here’s why it belongs in this particular letter. That pulsing Moog figure is the exact sound I described up top: an oscillator throwing off far more than anyone needs, pushed through the ladder filter until it turns warm. There is a lot happening underneath “So Many.” The piano is the one line I wanted you to actually hear, sitting calm on top of all that motion. Which, now that I’ve said it out loud, is the same thing I spend most days trying to pull off.

So many things pressing forward, all at once, all the time. The whole trick is choosing which one to keep your ears on.

(Hit play below to listen.)

Sent Out

I once heard someone who works with parents say that the single best thing you can do when your kid walks into the room is put your phone down. Not face-down on the table while you keep a hand on it. All the way down, and let it go. Because a kid reads a held phone the way a microphone reads a room. Even on mute, even with your eyes locked on them, the thing in your hand is broadcasting where your attention actually lives. A device you’re still holding is a frequency you haven’t filtered out yet.

I’m not here to wag a finger about any of this. (I’ve got a HomePod that flirts with my father and a scroll habit I’m not proud of.) But the Moog handed me a frame I can’t shake, so I’ll pass it to you for the next two weeks.

What might you need to filter out?

Just one frequency. The loudest distraction, or the quiet one humming under everything else. Carve it away for an afternoon and listen to what’s left underneath. Then hit reply and tell me what you heard. I read every one.

Chad

p.s. — One more thing about that Moog, because it’s been sitting with me since I learned it.

I always pictured Bob Moog’s synthesizers coming out of Asheville, North Carolina. Moog has been based there for decades, and still designs and builds instruments in the city, though the company changed hands a few years ago and has since moved much of its manufacturing overseas. Either way, Asheville isn’t where the story starts.

The modular Moog and the Minimoog, the instruments that put that warm, filtered sound onto all those records, were designed and built in a small village called Trumansburg, New York. A converted storefront on Main Street, a few dozen people on the payroll, in a town most of the world has never heard of.

I grew up in the Finger Lakes. Trumansburg is right there, a short drive from where I was a kid who had no idea what a synthesizer even was, let alone that the most famous one ever made was being dreamed up a couple of towns over.

It took me forty-some years and a move halfway across the country to finally bring one home. Turns out the sound I’d been chasing my entire life was built in my own backyard, the whole time, back when I wasn’t listening.

There’s a stretch of sidewalk in my neighborhood where, most evenings, the three of us settle the same argument and never actually settle it.

My wife, my daughter, and I walk after dinner, when the light goes flat and the streetlights start thinking about coming on. And somewhere in the last year (I couldn’t tell you how), these walks turned into a standing debate about walkout songs. The ones that announce you before you’ve done a thing. We make cases. We overrule each other. My daughter will float a song I’d never have considered, defend it like a closing argument, and dismantle my pick before I’ve finished making it.

We almost never agree. That’s sort of the point.

Because underneath the bickering is a question I find genuinely irresistible: what makes a walkout song actually work? Why some of them land, why some turn a stadium into a single held breath while others just sit there.

So before I get to the question I really want you sitting with, here are the three I keep coming back to.

Start with Mariano Rivera. (I’ve been a Yankees fan for thirty years, so take my objectivity for what it’s worth.) For the better part of two decades, the moment the Yankees needed the door slammed shut, the bullpen gate would swing open and Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” would come crawling out of the Yankee Stadium speakers: that slow, creeping intro, and then the drums detonating about fifteen seconds in. By then everyone in the building already knew the game was over. The threat is the whole point. The song’s about a sandman coming to put you to sleep, and here’s the greatest closer who ever lived strolling in to do exactly that. It’s a message to the hitter: here’s how your night ends.

Now swing all the way to the other end of the spectrum. When Barack Obama ran in 2008, the sound of that campaign (the music he walked out to) was U2’s “City of Blinding Lights.” No menace anywhere in it. Just The Edge’s guitar ringing out in those bright, chiming arpeggios, a few piano notes, and a build that feels like the sun coming up. If you could translate the word hope straight into sound, it might be those opening bars. Same job as Rivera’s entrance, to announce the man and set the room’s pulse, but aimed at the exact opposite feeling. One says be afraid. The other says believe.

And then there’s the one that breaks the rule entirely. In his prime, Mike Tyson often walked to the ring with no music at all. Just Tyson in black trunks, no socks, no robe, moving toward the ring in something close to silence. And it was terrifying. The absence of sound did what no song could: it left a vacuum, and your imagination filled it with dread. In a sport built on spectacle, the most intimidating entrance was the one that refused to perform. It’s something I keep relearning in my own studio: sometimes the most powerful sound in the room is the one you decide not to play.

Three entrances, three completely different sounds (a threat, a hymn to hope, and pure silence), and yet they’re all doing the same job. Each one is a sonic signature of a state of being. It takes something invisible (menace, hope, dread, certainty) and makes it audible, so the instant it hits the air, everyone in the room feels it.

Including, especially, the person walking out.

That’s the part I can’t stop thinking about. We read these entrances as messages aimed outward: a warning to the batter, a promise to a country, a threat to whoever’s in the other corner. All true. But the real work is happening somewhere else.

Watch a closer run in from the bullpen sometime and notice where his eyes go. Not the crowd. Nowhere, really. He’s somewhere else. The whole stadium screaming “Enter Sandman” might as well be weather. The song is doing its job on him: flipping some interior switch, narrowing the world down to sixty feet and six inches, summoning the version of himself the moment requires.

A walkout song is a private ritual that happens to have witnesses. A piece of sound chosen, deliberately, to call a specific aliveness up out of the body on command.

Which got me thinking about the rest of us: the ones who don’t get a bullpen gate or a hush before the bell. We’re all walking into something. Most of us just never stopped to pick the music.

If someone forwarded this to you and it sounds like your kind of thing, you can get the next one in your inbox, every other week.

Picked Up

Here’s where I turn the volume down on everything I just said.

James Blake put out a record this spring called Trying Times, his seventh, and the first he’s released completely on his own after years on a major label. The opening track is called “Walk Out Music.” Which, given everything you’ve just read, made me sit straight up.

Except it isn’t a walkout song. Not even close.

It opens the way you’d want one to: enormous, slow-moving synth pads, a sense of scale that keeps swelling without ever tipping over into noise. On good headphones it’s almost architectural; you can hear him building the room around you. For a moment you think you know exactly where this is headed.

And then it turns inward. The whole thing is built around a quiet, repeated line: a voice trying to talk itself into staying, caught somewhere between mercy and exhaustion. It’s a song about staying alive long enough to face yourself.

That’s the tension I can’t put down. He took the most external idea in all of music (the entrance, the spectacle, the summoning of your most dangerous self) and aimed it at the most internal thing there is. The title promises a stadium. The song hands you a mirror.

Put it on with headphones, in the dark, nothing else competing for you. Let the big synths do their work. Then catch the moment it stops performing for anyone but him.

Listen: Apple · Tidal · Spotify

In the Room

Everything you just read is about sound that flips you on. The entrance that summons your most dangerous self, the riff that floods you before the bell.

This part of my work runs the other direction.

Monica DiCristina came to us with a meditation on stillness. Monica’s a practicing therapist, and her podcast, Still Becoming, rests on a stubborn idea: we’re not made to stay the same, and it’s never too late to become more free, or more yourself. She wrote the meditation and gave it her voice. We did the rest of the listening: edited the audio, chose the music running underneath it, and mixed the whole thing so it would hold together.

Her image for stillness is water. Living water, the kind that still catches a ripple when the wind crosses the surface but stays calm underneath. The meditation walks you through naming the things that churn that surface, your worries, the people on your mind, the tasks left undone, and handing each one to a safe place so you can finally see the bottom.

What makes a piece like this hard is the same lesson Tyson’s silence taught a few hundred words ago. The hardest choices are about what to leave out. The music underneath has to make room instead of filling it, so when Monica asks you to set your worries down, there’s somewhere quiet to set them. And the last stretch, the one she leaves for pure stillness, is the part we worked hardest to protect. The part where we got out of the way and let the silence do the work.

You’re not supposed to notice any of that. If we did the job right, you don’t think about the sound at all. You just feel, somewhere you can’t point to, that it’s safe to be still.

Listen to Accessing Stillness on Still Becoming.

Sent Out

So. Back to that sidewalk.

We still haven’t settled it, my wife, my daughter, and me. We probably never will, and I’ve made my peace with that. But somewhere along the way I realized the argument had been sneaking up on a better question the whole time:

What’s your walkout song?

The honest one. The song that actually flips your switch, the one that would make you feel most like yourself the second it hit the speakers. And underneath that, the question it’s really standing in for: what is it that makes you come alive?

So here’s my invitation, and it’s a real one. Hit reply and tell me your walkout song. Just one. Extra credit if you tell me why it works: what it does to you in the first four seconds.

Some of your answers are going to end up in a future issue. I already know my taste isn’t the only one worth trusting around here.

And I’ll bring the best ones on our next walk. My daughter, I promise you, will have opinions.

Chad

p.s. — One last thing about that “Enter Sandman” entrance, since it’s been rattling around in my head all issue.

Mariano Rivera didn’t pick it.

The man that song is now permanently welded to had nothing to do with choosing it. By his own account he never paid attention to the music and couldn’t have told you it was Metallica. “I didn’t pick the song,” he said. He just went out there and did his job.

It was the scoreboard crew. After the Yankees brass watched Trevor Hoffman walk out to “Hells Bells” in San Diego back in ‘98, they went hunting for something with that same feel. They tried a couple of Guns N’ Roses tracks first, and neither took. Then a freelance crew guy lugged his own CD case in from Manhattan one Saturday, pointed at the first track on Metallica’s Black Album, and said this one.

And the building did the rest.

A roomful of people picked the most iconic walkout in sports, recognizing the right sound the instant they heard it. Nobody had to be told.

They just knew.

That hiss is the thing I want to talk about here. Not the headline. The texture underneath it. The detail you only catch when you lean in.

So before we get to any of that — hi. I’m Chad. Let me tell you why a grown man started a newsletter about listening.

I grew up inside sound before I had any say in the matter. My grandmother played piano and put my hands on the keys before I could spell. My grandfather kept a guitar and an amp in his attic and showed me my first three chords up there among the dust and the boxes. And my dad ran a radio network, which meant I grew up around microphones and speakers and tape machines the way other kids grow up around tools in a garage. By high school, I had my own radio show. By college, I was producing and editing, and designing sound for other people, and somewhere in a music conservatory in Phoenix, I figured out that the studio was where I wanted to spend my hours — on my own terms, eventually, which is how Sound On // Sound Off came to be back in 2016.

That’s the résumé version. The truer version is simpler: I have spent thirty years convinced that the way something sounds is doing far more work on us than we give it credit for. The pacing of a podcast. The room tone under a film scene. The reverb tail that tells you a piano is alone in a big empty hall. We feel all of it, mostly without noticing. My whole job — and, increasingly, my whole way of moving through the world — is noticing.

Which brings me to what this is.

Tape Hiss is a short letter, every other week, about sound, music, and listening well. My hope is that you can read it over a cup of coffee and walk away from it wanting to put something on, or wanting to step outside and hear your own street a little differently. There’s a real fear, I think, in how much good audio exists now — the sense that there’s too much, that you’ll never find the good stuff, that you’ll just keep replaying the same forty songs or listening to the same podcast until you die. I’d like to be a small antidote to that. Not a firehose. A curator with opinions and a low tolerance for the boring.

Every issue is built the same way, in three movements — the same path a sound takes through my studio:

Picked Up — something I heard out in the world and loved. In the Room — something I’m making or shaping right now, in the studio. Sent Out — something for you to go listen to, or a way to listen, for the next two weeks.

Heard it, made it, sending it on. Let me show you what I mean. Here’s a preview of all three.

If someone forwarded this to you and it sounds like your kind of thing, you can get the next one in your inbox, every other week.

Picked Up

Here’s a confession that will horrify some of you: I haven’t watched a single minute of BEEF Season 2. Not one. And I’ve listened to the soundtrack maybe a hundred times.

BEEF Season 2 (Original Soundtrack) — Finneas O’Connell

Listen: Apple · Tidal · Spotify

I want to make a case for a category of music I think is underrated and under-discussed, which is the working album — a record with enough energy and intrigue to keep you company while your hands are busy, but not so much personality that it elbows its way to the front and ruins your concentration. It’s a narrow lane. Most music fails it in one direction or the other: too sleepy to keep you moving, or too interesting to ignore. Finneas threads it perfectly here.

I know it threads it because I keep reaching for it without deciding to. It was the first thing I put on as I dozed off during takeoff on a recent flight. It woke me up gently on an early-morning walk a few days later, easing me into the day rather than jolting me. And yesterday, in a coffee shop loud enough to be useless, I put the noise-canceling headphones on, turned this up, and got two genuinely productive hours done. Three completely different jobs — sleep, walking, focus — and one record quietly handled all of them. That’s not nothing. That’s a craftsman who understands function, not just mood.

I'll watch the show eventually. You should put on the record now.

In the Room

Two things, this first time only — because the studio has two halves, and I want you to see both.

The half that’s mine. A piece I’m calling “Melting.” I started it back when Nashville was thawing out from that brutal ice storm this past winter — the one that shut the whole city down and then, days later, just quietly released its grip and dripped away. The track is the most me thing I make: piano, synth, and a great deal of reverb, which are, if I’m honest, the three ingredients in basically everything I’ll ever play you here. Consider this your warning.

(Hit play below to listen.)

(My dog has been the primary audience for this one so far. Her review was a long sigh and a relocation to the other room, which I’ve chosen to interpret generously.)

It does what its name does. It fades up out of near-silence, settles into a warm, low haze, and stays there — no big swells yanking you around, just a slow bloom that builds a little in the back half before it dissolves back into nothing at the end. It opens out of silence and melts back into it. It’s unfinished, and I’m sharing it anyway, because that’s part of the deal with this letter: you get to hear things while they’re still wet.

The half that’s other people’s. This past year, my team has been working with Vanderbilt University on their podcast Quantum Potential, and we recently put out an episode I’d been quietly excited about for weeks — a conversation between the show’s host, Provost C. Cybele Raver, and the author and “happiness professor” Arthur Brooks.

Brooks has become one of my favorite writers, so getting to live inside this conversation in the edit was a genuine treat. It also happened to be the episode where they announced that he’s leaving Harvard to come teach at Vanderbilt next fall, which is a lovely bit of news to get to be the ones carrying.

My team edited and mixed the episode (above) and built the video trailer (below). The work there is invisible when it’s done right — the point is that you stop thinking about the sound and just lean toward two smart people talking. That’s the whole job.

Sent Out

No assignment this time, just an invitation.

For the next two weeks, I want you to find the hiss. Not on a record — in a room. The hum of your refrigerator. The specific pitch of your car on the highway. The sound your house makes at 11pm when everyone else is asleep. We spend so much energy filtering this stuff out that we forget it’s a soundtrack too, playing constantly, scoring our lives whether we’re listening or not.

Pick one. Just once. Stop filtering, and actually hear it.

Then tell me what you found. I read everything.

Until the next one — keep your ears open.

Chad

p.s. — Here’s the thing about tape hiss: it isn’t really “up high” at all. It’s broadband — smeared across the whole spectrum. But we hear it as hiss because our ears are most sensitive right in the 2 to 8 kHz range, the band where presence and clarity live. So the noise isn’t hiding up there. Our attention is. The ghost in the machine turned out to be sitting exactly where we listen hardest. I think about that more than is probably healthy.