Tape Hiss: The Sound That Stamps a Place
On the songs that hand you a room you thought you'd left for good.
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.