Top 30 Cassette Quotes

Technology has very little to do with what I do. I have a purpose built studio but all I need for writing is my piano and a cassette recorder as I still use cassettes.

The people I idolized I saw once a year on the Tony Awards. I would buy the cassette tapes of the various Broadway shows and scour the photos inside the recording package. That’s how I exposed myself to the arts – New York and professional theater felt like a very distant thing.

I remember the first time I received a cassette tape of a band called The Clash. I became an instant fan of the Clash and then bought their albums after that and went to their concerts and gave them my money… but I first got it for free.

I used to record ‘Futurama’ episodes on my cassette player and play it to help me go to sleep.

When I write songs, it’s just me and a cassette player – or at least it used to be before smartphones – to quickly record a basic idea.

I have some vivid memories of walking around as a child with a cassette tape.

My older brother gave me a cassette tape of Mr. Bungle, and I couldn’t stop listening to it. I used to drive around Colorado in a Mustang II – it was when they got away from the muscle-car Mustangs, so it was sort of old lady. I couldn’t go above 45 mph in that car, but I would drive around listening to Mr. Bungle.

I don’t like the way recording to digital sounds. Most of the time, when I’m recording to two-inch tape, I still have a romantic vision of how songs sounded coming out of the radio when I was younger, and how they sounded coming out of my little four-track cassette player.

Harmony Korine, the screenwriter, was really into my early work. I did a lot of stuff under the name Sentridoh and a lot of 4-track cassette stuff that he was into.

I don’t even know how people managed without the Internet years ago. Having to mail a cassette tape of your music to strangers over the course of months… I just can’t imagine having to do that.

You know, we were outdoorsy types, my folks, and one of the first tapes I got, a friend gave me a cassette tape of Ella Fitzgerald singing with the Count Basie orchestra. And it was the first time, really, that someone’s voice had really spoken to me, and it was just so pure.

I used to make cassette tapes but never thought about making a career of it.

I used to do semi-classical dance as a child; I did not have a choreographer, but my mother gave me a cassette to learn from.

After we got our first family car with a tape deck, my dad acquired exactly three cassette tapes: A ‘Best of ABBA,’ ‘Private Heaven’ by Sheena Easton, and the soundtrack to ‘Xanadu.’ I also unironically love ‘Xanadu.’

I never paid attention when the LP became the cassette and the cassette became the CD and now we’re dealing, you know, with MP3s. It’s okay.

Growing up, I was definitely surrounded by music all the time. My parents used to always play music; my dad used to have reggae on. I remember walking around with a cassette recorder, and I used to just record the songs I would hear on the radio so I could play it back when I feel like.

My parents are from the South – they were both born in Birmingham – so my dad saw R.E.M. really early on when they were playing college stuff in Athens. He had a bunch of their cassettes from the ’80s, and when I was 8, 9, or 10, those were the sort of things that were around the cassette player in the living room.

I’m not saying that kids today have everything, but with the Internet, it’s like, you have it there, so use it! I know a bunch of kids who are into cassette tapes now. Cassette tapes suck! Why not use your iPod?

My parents are musicians. I was listening to the radio and recording songs off the radio on cassette tapes and playing guitars and pianos. Just emotionally responding to music from a very young age.

Yeah, you know, I’m always into cassette. At least they seem to be the longest-lasting medium we used to have. I don’t play cassettes much anymore, but I play records all the time.

My brother came home from college with a Mountain Goats cassette and I was like, ‘What is this?’ The lyrics were crazy to me. I’d never heard anything like it.

I graduated from high school in 1963. There were no computers, cell phones, Internet, credit cards, cassette tapes or cable TV.

After my second No. 1, my record company, Warner Brothers, gave me a beautiful present – quite unique at the time – one of the very first Sony stereos which had speaker and radio included so I could record the radio and build up cassette tapes of music, gospel singing, adverts, evangelists.

A lot of times Mick will play me different things, or I’ll listen to a cassette, and out of twenty ideas or whatever, I’ll find two or three that are just blowing me away, and we’ll start working on them right away.

I like making little videos and little records. I’ve always loved video cameras and four-track cassette recorders, still cameras, anything.

A great song is a great song, whether it’s on vinyl or CD or cassette or reel to reel or mp3. Then again, that might be an overly optimistic view, but I do think that great music will transcend the medium in which it is delivered.

In the early ’90s, my cousin gave me a Snoop Dogg cassette tape, and the rawness of the lyrics were something new to me.

I remember listening to Eddie Murphy’s Delirious on cassette tape – you might have to explain what that is to your younger demographic – with my father. I wanted to make people laugh that hard.

I would go to the store, I would buy cassette tapes, and I would read the liner notes and sort of subconsciously creating the connections between the rappers that I was reading and the poets that they were teaching us in school.

When I was 10, 11, 12 years old, I would pretend to be on the radio. I bought a mixer and these big, ugly headphones and I would literally broadcast the cassette tapes in my bedroom.