It's me. It's early on whatever day it is.

And this is the last day of the studio. It closed yesterday.

And so we're going to decommission the studio today.

It's going to be chaotic, so, but I'm just kind of giving you like the atlas of my complicated

emotional life.

People ask me how it feels to break down the studio.

I think that I really processed the studio closing maybe a year ago, a year and a half ago. And it was really sad. I mean, it kind of fucked me up

as this was my life for 22 years. That was the voice of John Vanderslice, recorded in

2020, as he prepared to permanently close Tiny Telephone San Francisco,

the recording studio he had owned for more than two decades.

Founded in 1997, Tiny Telephone developed a reputation as a home for creativity and classic analog techniques.

It also became a musical Mecca for bands like Spoon, the Mountain Goats, Death Cab for Cutie,

The Magnetic Fields, Deerhoof, Slater Kinney, and many more.

Over the next few hours, we're going to hear from the people who were there to learn how tiny telephone was born,

what made it so special, and how it came to an end. I'm Young

Chomsky, and this is Keep the Dream Alive. Keep the dream alive. My name is John VanderSlyce. I own tiny telephone recording and I put out records under my name and under orange purple beach.

I grew up in Florida in northern rural Florida like Gainesville and Williston, Swanee River, Jacksonville. And I grew up in a house without any

music at all. There was no stereo. There wasn't really any media or culture. And actually, I began to

think that years later that this was actually like a really good thing.

But the first time I heard music, my babysitter brought over a boombox and played the Who's Tommy.

By the way, I had a huge crush on this babysitter. And it wasn't the who's, it wasn't like the actual record Tommy. It was the film soundtrack of Tommy, which is like many levels down in quality from the actual album. And she put on this record in it just felt like the most unknowable, confusing shit I've ever heard,

but it was incredibly important for me to understand it because it would make me closer to my babysitter.

...