The night before every job, I record a cassette. One tape per job, no repeats, no exceptions. The Walkman came from my mother, who won it in a school disco dance-off in 1989 and considers this the most impressive fact about our family, ahead of my grandfather allegedly wrestling an elk.
The rules are simple. Side A is the drive out: whatever the job needs. For the Fanta commercial, Side A was seven Italo disco tracks and a Latvian pop song about strawberries that I will defend with my life. For a lookbook where I had to look moody in a plaid coat for six hours, Side A was cello suites and one, single, inexplicable eurodance track that the sound of, to this day, makes me stand up straighter. Side B is for the wrap - Side B is always joy. Side B is the tape equivalent of taking off your shoes after a long day.
People ask why I don't just make playlists. Because a playlist is a suggestion and a tape is a commitment. You can't skip. You committed at 11pm the night before, hunched over the tape deck like a medieval scribe, and now you live with your choices for exactly forty-five minutes a side. It's the same discipline the job asks of you: decide, then deliver, no shuffle.
The shoebox under my bed currently holds sixty-one tapes, labelled in silver marker: client, city, date. The dock shoot from last July is in there - the one where the wind did in one take what a fan machine had failed to do in thirty. When I flip that tape on, I'm back on the warm planks with ducks heckling the light readings.
A stylist once offered me actual money for the box. Absolutely not. That box is the only complete record of my career that doesn't belong to a client. Also, and I cannot stress this enough, half those songs are embarrassing, and a legacy needs its secrets.