Back in the olden days of making mixtapes on an analog 4-track, a Pioneer CDJ-1000 rented from an audio store for the weekend, and a handful of CD-Rs, I set about making a mixtape of all love and love-related songs. I wanted something extra to add to it, so I searched around the internet for some good vocal samples of people saying sweet things to one another.
Brainstormed a bit then I thought, hey, what if I plugged the TV into the 4-track, got a blank 120-minute cassette tape, turned on daytime television and recorded episodes of soap operas. They say lovey-dovey things on them soaps, don’t they?
Don’t remember how I managed to program it to record; my TASCAM 4-track could do a lot of things, but I always had to be there to make it do stuff. But over the course of about a week, I’d amassed four 120-minute tapes full of audio from shows like The Young and the Restless, The Bold and the Beautiful, The Sweaty and the Smelly, et. al. At the time, I didn’t watch any of these shows, so I didn’t know who was saying what to whom, or why they were saying it.
But I listened to it all, and pulled a few excerpts from shows of what I thought were sweet moments, or other kinds of stuff that might flow good on a love songs mixtape. Also, an audio clip from one of my favorite cartoons of all time made it onto the mix as well (if you can find it and identify it, you rock as a human).
Looking back on that mix over a decade later, I can’t help but admire the diligence that guy had. Whether or not it was worth it, is in the ear of the beholder.