It's me. It's early on whatever day it is. And there's the last day of the studio, closed

yesterday. And so we're going to decommission the studio today. It's going to be chaotic.

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. 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.

My name is John Vanderslice. 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, Swansea River, Jacksonville. I grew up in a house without any

music at all. There was no stereo, there wasn't really any media or culture. Actually, I

began to think that years later that this was actually a really good thing. The first

time I heard music, my babysitter brought over a boom box and played The Who's Tommy.

By the way, I had a huge crush on this babysitter and it wasn't the actual record Tommy.

It was the film soundtrack of Tommy, which is like many levels down in quality from the

...