Several years back, I had a tape recorder in the passenger seat.
Not for anything important. Song ideas, mostly — I’d get a melody or a line while driving and reach over and hit record and sing it at the windshield. Later there was a little handheld one, and after that an MP3 recorder. Same habit, better hardware.
Almost none of it survived. The songs did, some of them, and a handful have since turned into real recordings. The talking is gone. Twenty years of ideas and observations and half-worked-out thinking, recorded onto tape and then never touched again, because the only thing to do with a tape is play it back in real time and I never once had a spare hour to listen to myself.
I’ve gone back to a few of those old songs lately. Here’s what I couldn’t hear at the time: the guitar is out of tune. Not wildly. Just enough. I didn’t know how to tune it properly back then and I had no idea that’s what I was listening to.
In the mid-2000s I worked at an insurance office and typed reports as a part of the job.
I got fast. Genuinely fast — that’s where the speed came from, and I still have it. I can still type 70 words a minute. I also came out of that job with a permanent aversion to long-form typing that has never once let up.
Somewhere in there I found a transcription tool, an Australian one whose name I’ve lost. I used it at work and then quietly for my own stuff. It transcribed, which sounds like the answer, except it put me right back at the keyboard cleaning up everything I’d said. The tool converted speech into a typing job. It didn’t remove the work; it moved it.
So the pattern for twenty years was: capture cheaply, pay dearly on the back end, and mostly just not pay — which is why the tapes are gone.
None of that was the actual problem.
I’m an auditory processor. I don’t think a thing through and then say it. I say it in order to think it through. The sentence coming out of my mouth is not a report on a conclusion, it’s the mechanism arriving at one, and it usually takes me a while to get there.
What that cost me — and I didn’t have words for this until more recently — is that most people can’t tell the difference. I’ve had to start telling people when I am thinking out loud.
Why you ask? I’d be mid-process, three or four minutes into working something out, and somebody would take a sentence from minute two and start acting on it. Building the plan. Pushing back. Getting concerned. Meanwhile I hadn’t landed yet, and now I’m defending a position I was only passing through.
I never used to say, I’m still thinking, let me get to the end. It didn’t occur to me that this needed announcing. I assumed everybody’s thinking sounded like this from the outside. My wife was the first one to point it out to me. I’m glad she did.
That’s the thing I couldn’t hear. Same as the guitar.
What changed is smaller than it sounds.
I can talk into my phone and get the text out the other side. Recently I spent four hours on a road trip, just talking, and every word of it came back to me in a form I could actually work with. Then I hand it off and it comes back organized instead of transcribed.
The capture was never the hard part. I’d solved capture in 1998 with a cassette. What I’d never had was somewhere to put four unedited hours where nothing would interrupt me at minute nine.
I don’t get better ideas than I got in the car twenty years ago. I get to keep them now, and I get to finish them out loud before anyone responds to them. That’s the whole difference. Everything I’ve made this year runs on it.
Twenty years of building workarounds for a constraint I never named. The recorder, the MP3 player, the software from Australia — all of it aimed at the storage problem, which was never really the problem.
I was in tune the entire time. I just needed to get all the way through the song before somebody stopped me.
David Willis 