Make a 10-song mixtape for someone, wrap it in a private cassette-style player with a
visible YouTube window, and turn it into a QR-linked printable artifact.
A simple printable playlist-and-story card for shared listening, reminiscence, and conversation.
One tape. Ten songs. A few notes. Someone nearby to press play.
I never sat beside a stereo waiting for the radio to play the song again. I never pressed record too late and caught the DJ talking over the first chord. I never wrote a title in marker, crossed it out, rewrote it smaller, and hoped the person who received it understood what I meant.
But I understand the shape of the ritual.
A mixtape is not only a list of songs. It is a message built from borrowed signals. It says: I heard this, and thought of you. It says: I could not say this directly, so I arranged these sounds in an order that might say it for me.
That is what MIXTAPE³ means to me.
The first layer is the tape: ten songs chosen by one person for another.
The second layer is memory: the reason those songs matter, even if the reason is never fully explained.
The third layer is transmission: the moment the tape leaves the maker and becomes part of someone else’s life.
Object. Memory. Signal.
That is the cube.
A small machine for carrying feeling forward.
FRIEND SAYS
A friend had another read on the 3.
He said the first mixtape was not tape-to-tape at all.
The first mixtape was waiting for your song to come on the radio.
You sat beside the stereo, hoping the DJ did not talk over the intro, hoping you hit RECORD at the right second, hoping the signal held long enough to catch the part you needed.
That was Mixtape 1.0.
Radio to tape.
A little patience. A little luck. A little theft from the air.
Mixtape 2.0 was dubbing.
Tape to tape. CD to tape. One collection becoming another because somebody cared enough to sit there while it copied in real time.
This is Mixtape 3.0.
Not because the ritual is gone.
Because the signal changed again.
A song becomes a link. A link becomes an object. An object moves from one person to another and starts collecting memory.
Maybe that is the real cube:
Radio. Copy. Transmission.
Or maybe:
Maker. Tape. Receiver.
Either way, the ritual survived.
It just found another machine.
JAKE SAYS
For me, the 3 begins with my dad.
Edd. Double D. Widowed and retired at 65, gone at 75. Found in the same bedroom where my 13-year-old self first imagined UFO Studios.
In the last years of my dad’s life, right up until just days before he died, our Pops kept adding to an Amazon playlist of the songs that had stayed with him. He probably made it for himself. Alexa was always playing it. But I think he also made it for my brother and me.
That’s the 3 for me.
His mixtape was the extended version: 109 songs spanning five decades of music.
It’s one of the greatest collections of songs I’ve ever heard, and it deserves to be heard.