Boombox

Um, and, and one of my favorite songwriters is, um, Robert Pollard from Guide to My Voices.

What I love doing with his work is he puts out all of his old demos and you'll hear the idea of a song that came out 20 years later in these demos that he created on Boombox in 1985.

And I just love how that all connects.

And I love how the songwriter's mind, like what you're saying, kind of goes back to this idea, like this little bit of an idea that you created in a room somewhere.

The sultry vocals and baritone sax carried me right back to our old condo, to afternoons well spent with Henry, pulling tracks off YouTube and dubbing them onto cassette.

With my recent purchase of the Boombox, I also bought a pack of blank tapes, TDKs.

No fancy Maxell 2s this time, but close enough for rock and roll.

I pulled one off the shelf and held the blank in my hand.

You're holding a sound...

Boombox.

Boombox, perfect.

And instead of a boombox, you're holding a bag of Fuego Takis.

Yeah.

It was 1987.

Boombox, new wave, neon, press play.

I love the 80s.

to come and save me.

That was fun.

And then Boombox and then the Discman.

All right.

A hundred years ago today, Walkman was yours.

And then with Alien Lanes, we were trying to go into an eight-track cassette.

But a lot of the stuff was still on Boombox, like it was on Alien Lanes, which was...

We didn't care, because we didn't think it was going to...

At one point, we thought, we're just making records for ourselves, and we like the way they sound, so...

This art piece that is one of the first that I was introduced to by you.

It's called the Boombox.

It's about sugar cane.

It's about cotton.

But right now comes part two of my conversation with Bayate Ross-Smith.

I want to bring it back to this art piece that is one of the first that I was introduced to by you.

It's called The Boombox.

It's about sugar cane.

Wow

... that, that I dubbed on, well, in the Pro Tools onto my laptop, and it was, it was me and Mike with the acoustic guitar, just the two of us singing into this little Ghetto Blaster with a four-inch speaker and a little mic up in the corner.

Yeah.

And a volume and a tone and a, you know, the, the four little switches to make it play.