March 4, 2026
A song that you discovered in an unusual way.
This might not seem unusual to anyone over a certain age, but this prompt made me think about the ways I discovered music before the internet. When I was at school, one way was swapping tapes. During breaks, we'd retrieve our cassettes from battered military-surplus backpacks and do swapsies. They were often copies, or even copies of copies, made from an unknowing or pitying older sibling's original. One particular tape I came by had Come on Pilgrim and part of Surfer Rosa on one side, the rest on the other. For a while, I thought both records were a single album. Anyway, that's how I first discovered The Pixies. Simpler, more innocent times.