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finncullenThere has been a cassette tape in my life for many years. An old C90 tape filled with a variety of songs. I think it was compiled by my father, but I'm not entirely sure, it's just always been around. It ended up in my music collection when I was a kid and I played it and played it. The music covered a wide variety of bands and styles ranging from the 1950s to the 1980s and I got to like most of the songs a lot.
As it got older though it started to get a bit worn and a bit gnarled up in places - a common problem with old cassettes, and the amount it got played really didn't help it.
One of my favourite tracks on it was "Free Will" by Rush, a hippy/prog-rock anthem extolling the virtues of rationality over superstition and religion as a basis for living. And in the middle of the instrumental break the tape had a fault. It wasn't twisted or broken, or anything visible, but the music always distorted in one particular place, odd notes, mangled noises, even a moment or two of a Phil Collins track from the corresponding position on the other side of the tape. It only lasted a few seconds and then carried on as normal.
Well the tape finally took the road less travelled and gave up the ghost entirely, and that felt like the end of an era in many ways. That particular mix of music had been a companion of mine through my childhood and adolescence and losing it felt like a hole had been made.
Time moves on, and technology with it, so I started to gather the individual tracks in mp3 format so I could at least rebuild the compilation, and I've pretty much done it now (I'll be honest there were one or two tracks that I never really liked, so I'm not buying them again just for the sake of it).
And of course I've now got a new copy of "Free Will" in mp3 format, and I still enjoy the song. And of course it's perfect. It's as the band intended. It plays nicely all the way through without any distortion in the middle. The instrumental starts, continues, and gives way to the final verse without any blemish or interruption.
And it never sounds right to me now. I grew up with that distortion, it belonged there. In the same way that your mind, on listening to a familiar album of music, mentally anticipates the next song in the queue as the current one ends, so my mind always anticipates that strange defect in the track. And of course it's not there. It disappoints me. It has made me realise that fixing something isn't always the best option, it's not always even required. The defect over time became normal to me, even something to be missed when it was gone. I've got "Free Will" now, and I've got it as it was intended, but I miss the real version, my real version.
As it got older though it started to get a bit worn and a bit gnarled up in places - a common problem with old cassettes, and the amount it got played really didn't help it.
One of my favourite tracks on it was "Free Will" by Rush, a hippy/prog-rock anthem extolling the virtues of rationality over superstition and religion as a basis for living. And in the middle of the instrumental break the tape had a fault. It wasn't twisted or broken, or anything visible, but the music always distorted in one particular place, odd notes, mangled noises, even a moment or two of a Phil Collins track from the corresponding position on the other side of the tape. It only lasted a few seconds and then carried on as normal.
Well the tape finally took the road less travelled and gave up the ghost entirely, and that felt like the end of an era in many ways. That particular mix of music had been a companion of mine through my childhood and adolescence and losing it felt like a hole had been made.
Time moves on, and technology with it, so I started to gather the individual tracks in mp3 format so I could at least rebuild the compilation, and I've pretty much done it now (I'll be honest there were one or two tracks that I never really liked, so I'm not buying them again just for the sake of it).
And of course I've now got a new copy of "Free Will" in mp3 format, and I still enjoy the song. And of course it's perfect. It's as the band intended. It plays nicely all the way through without any distortion in the middle. The instrumental starts, continues, and gives way to the final verse without any blemish or interruption.
And it never sounds right to me now. I grew up with that distortion, it belonged there. In the same way that your mind, on listening to a familiar album of music, mentally anticipates the next song in the queue as the current one ends, so my mind always anticipates that strange defect in the track. And of course it's not there. It disappoints me. It has made me realise that fixing something isn't always the best option, it's not always even required. The defect over time became normal to me, even something to be missed when it was gone. I've got "Free Will" now, and I've got it as it was intended, but I miss the real version, my real version.
