Music Archive
& Roots

A tiny underline

I grew up around my father’s large record collection. When he liked a song, he put a tiny underline beneath its track number on the sleeve. It was his own quiet way of keeping track.

He eventually sold the collection in Boise to make the switch to CDs. Collectors there still recognized records from his collection by those little marks. That attention to songs—the favorites, the discoveries, the tracks worth coming back to—was part of the music culture I grew up in.

Mixtapes as a starting point

My childhood mixtapes held ’50s and ’60s songs alongside the classic rock I heard at home. Bowie, Peter Gabriel, and INXS became early favorites too. Later came my own records, thrift-store finds, CDs, soundtracks, and years of following one song toward another.

I’m now reconstructing some of those old mixes from surviving tapes and memory. The gaps are part of the archive: a familiar sequence, a half-remembered transition, a song that puts me back in a particular room.

Collecting, singing, writing, and experimenting grew alongside each other. These records and saved moments are pieces of that longer history.