This post is for Marty, Eric, and Kevin S. who will know this album well from my raving about it.

I really had no idea what I was going to blog about today and then the news came down the wire... Eddie Van Halen, lead guitarist and founding member of Van Halen, succumbed to cancer at the age of 65. 

One of my favorite things about cassettes is finding ones that are not available in other media formats or on streaming services. This tends to happen a lot with hits albums and original soundtracks (OST) and other sorts of compilations. 

Just trying to live the Joe Strummer ideal. 

I'm sorry for not posting this sooner, but my fave label, Polyvinyl Records, is having a customer appreciation day deal today. If you are a registered PV user, you will get a $5 giftcard applied to any purchase made today. Just login, shop, and the $5 will be available on the cart page for you to opt into.

If there’s one thing about music that bugs me, it’s when songs I love are used in a way that either annoys me or in a way that angers or doesn’t mesh with the beliefs of the original artists. 

Lemme get your opinion on something here... if you were given a choice between buying an open tape and a sealed tape, which would you choose? And, before you just blurt out the obvious choice, lemme throw in some potentially decision-affecting considerations.

I’m going to do something that hasn’t been done here in nearly seven months. Nope, not since December 17. It’s Taped! Number 19! 

When Nathan invited Katie to watch TV with him in his bedroom, I was told to hang out as his bed isn’t really big enough for all three of us. 

Given the plethora of free entertainment that's been made available during this pandemic, it's shocking how little of it I've taken part in. Even the live music that everyone and their mother is streaming. 

I know most of you have, at the very least, heard of the band Rage Against the Machine. They were a heavy metal/rap-rock band that started in the early 1990s and are very well known for their highly politicized songwriting. They are, IMHO, the guitar-driven equivalent of my beloved Public Enemy, although Megadeth is up there as well.

I've been doing some wheeling and dealing online lately to get some cassettes I want. I finally negotiated a deal for one of my white whale tapes and was waiting for the woman on the other end to send it to me. 

I’m looking for a new audiobook. I love music and music history. Can you see where this is going?

February 13 of this year marked the 30th anniversary of the debut album by a band I've loved since shortly before the day that album was released. The band? The Black Crowes. The album? Shake Your Money Maker.

If you're like me, you got pretty heavy into the whole MP3 (or whatever file type you preferred) craze in the first decade of the 2000s and into the 2010s. You bought songs and albums on services like iTunes, you ripped your CD collection to digital, or maybe you downloaded stuff illegally from whatever service was not blocked by your ISP.

Found this little gem over on Dave2’s blog. Although it proved to be a lot of work, it was very cool. Basically, you have to list a band you have seen live corresponding to each letter of the alphabet. 

Yes! Synths! As in “short for synthesizers.” Very expensive electronic music-making equipment but in iOS app format. 

One of my very favorite bands to arise from the post-grunge 90s is Chicago’s very own Urge Overkill.

Nathan’s been editing his Spotify playlist a bit lately. Removing some old songs he doesn’t want to hear anymore, adding some new ones, reordering a little.

As is becoming de rigeur this time of year, the lineup for the Pitchfork Music Festival has been released and Eric and I need to come to a decision about which day we’re gonna attend. C’mon, you should be used to this by now.

“Woah” is right. 

Yesterday I posted an embedded video copy of David Lee Roth’s “A Little Ain’t Enough” without watching it first.

As in David Lee Roth.

Diamond Dave.

The wild man with the high kicks and the distinctive gravelly voice. 

One of the things that I discovered (and continue to discover) as I delve back into the world of cassette tapes is the terminology of the trade. Sure, there are words and phrases that I knew from before. But there is so much more I never knew about.

I was listening to some music this morning on the way to work and thought, "Wow! This would be a great band to highlight in My Favorite Song. What's it been? A couple months since I've done one?"

Finally! After nearly seven years since the release of Lightning Bolt, Pearl Jam will be releasing their 11th studio album Gigaton on March 27.

This is kind of a fun little aside to the normal Tu(n)esday post. One in which I, a man with no medical training whatsoever, conduct surgery! On a tape. 

A week or so ago, I took Nathan to our one and only local record store - Kiss the Sky in Batavia, IL. He's 7 and I thought it would be cool to let him experience the joy of physical media. He loved it. But that's a story for another day.

I decided to bring back Taped for one last post this calendar year. I guess, technically, it's the last Taped post of the decade. Weird. I only realized this was the close of the decade about a week ago. I'd never considered it before that. 

What do you do when you have a bunch of really cool news about music that you wanna share? Save them for Tuesday and post your first-ever Tu(n)esday Snippets!!

It's amazing how dependent I've become on my iPhone. It does everything for me from receiving calls and text messages to playing any and all games to taking and sharing photos to verifying accounts and storing passwords to entertaining me via Spotify or podcasts or audiobooks. It does it all. And, no, I still don't have it back.

One of the coolest things about getting back into cassettes is watching as the culture rises up from the ashes like a phoenix. People who collected back in the day are finding their old stuff. Kids who should have no earthly idea what a cassette is are jumping on board. 

I was picking up some groceries on my way home when Katie called me and said, “Your son loves The Cure.”

I made some trades and sold some stuff at a resale shop and managed to nab these beauties...

If you could only pick one of the following, which would it be. No, you cannot suggest your own alternative. These are the only current options and even they could be subject to change based on availability. And, no, you will not be given any extra context.

In honor of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon, a musician I met on Reddit created a mixtape using actual cassette recordings from the mission itself.