Good morning! I hope the world is being good to you and you’re being good to it.

Grab your coffee or beverage of choice and share a thought with me!

The cartridge was slightly bigger than a credit card but too bulky and fragile to go in a pocket. Thankfully, it came encased in a slightly sturdier plastic case, with a hinged lid that that gave a satisfying pop and click when opening and closing. The case itself was adorned with a thick-stocked paper insert that provided decoration or information, depending on which side you viewed. The cartridge, however, was the star of the show. Within its plastic rested a spool of magnetic tape, and on that magnetic tape was contained wonderful music set to fill home or auto with melodious thrill.

Set between vinyl and compact disc, the beautiful cassette tape, in any of its iterations, may hold special memories for certain generations. Whether recording or listening, the cassette provided an accessible medium for creating and collecting music. Personally, the cassette is where my music collection started with some Presidents of the United States of America, Hootie and the Blowfish, TLC, and, um, Des’ree (You Gotta Be deserves to be played on repeat and you can’t convince me otherwise). Then, before the introduction of the Sony Discman with car cassette adapter, I took to creating copies of my favorite CDs onto cassettes to make them car friendly. I still remember having Live’s Dolphin’s Cry cranked to put my Chevy Cavalier’s speakers to the test. Sadly, however, I never invested the effort into creating mix tapes before burning CDs came along and streamlined the process. Not partaking in the mixtape creation ritual makes me feel like I missed out on a key historical activity.

It appears that cassettes are like many things, their existence and popularity are cyclical. Many modern albums now release on vinyl, cassette, CD, and digital. Since I still have my old stereo from high school sporting a dual cassette deck, just last year I purchased a new cassette for the first time in probably thirty years. I’m not planning a return to cassette-centric collecting, but the experience brought back those memories from yesteryear. It felt like quite the time trip to hold a new cassette in my hand in 2025.

Did you live a cassette life back in the day? Do you still? Were you able to become a mixtape guru? I’d love to swap nostalgic stories about the good things of the past, because whether music consumption occurred on cassette or disc, the tactile experience of listening on those mediums created the foundation for my love of music today.