Polaroid Playlists: Dave Nadig Returns to JUST PRESS RECORD

If you’re reading my stuff, I’m willing to bet that there was a point in your life when you would just go out and see what was going on. It’s a communal curiosity thing. Very common in our early to mid 20s especially. For Dave Nadig, this happened to him when he was out of college and living in San Francisco, looking for a scene to be a part of, and catching all sorts of cool acts along the way.

You do this for a while and then - life happens. The going out fades, for whatever reason. Usually those relationships fade out too. And it’s all ok. Like, really OK.

But why is it so OK? Why is it so - almost, important - that it’s a phase? That it’s so temporal?

Why does a moment we can't recreate become so important to how we show up in the present?

I worry a lot about the state of humanity, and - this is an answer to a ton of my concerns here people.

It’s about being present. It’s about the experience. With no follow-on group chat or email chain. No permanent record. Just a fun thing we did for a while where everybody had a good time and can look back with a smile.

On a previous Just Press Record, radio personality and author Laurie Kaye talked to music blogger Kevin Alexander and I about crystalizing moments for radio. She told us about the specials she made, the shows she documented, the interviews she captured. She’s thrilled looking back that she did it. And not because of what was on the radio exclusively, but because the act of bothering to preserve and share the moment has created meaning in her life and all sorts of listeners too.

When Kevin writes a post mixing up new and old music takes, alongside stories about driving his kids places or working at an airport, it’s a captured moment like this.

When Dave Nadig comes on a finance podcast and then makes a whole modern music playlist out of the themes, it’s a captured moment like this.

Everyone here is attempting to take a Polaroid of a moment they loved, in real time. It’s half for posterity. It’s half for Personal Archiving.

They’re recognizing the mutual value in stopping to say, “This matters,” and later, “This mattered.”

Dave crystalized this thought in my mind in our talk: there’s a difference between a scene that burns hot for a few years in our hearts that dissolves organically, and a piece of content that goes viral only to disappear by algorithm, or a pair of pants designed to fall apart when next year’s fashion is on the shelf.

One is alive in its time. The other is disposable by design. You can make a world of difference in your experience of this thing called life, if you can recognize when impermanence is part of the point.

So what if radio is dead, and there are more playlists than songs on your streaming platform of choice? Keep doing it. Keep sending up the signal that you were there and heard the thing. Whenever you did. Just document it.

Not because it’ll change the world forever, but because someone else in that moment might find out they weren’t alone in it too.

We save the future and we protect the past by getting more present.

Dwell on that, and listen to this wonderful conversation between Dave Nadig and I, prompted by some clips from Kevin Alexander and Laurie Kaye: