One finger on record, one ear on Rick Dees Weekly Top 40 and absolutely no patience for anyone talking over the intro. Three decades later, the cassette player is gone, but the urge to catch songs, keep them and pass them around has never left. Penny Brand writes.

Imagine this. It is 1993. School is done, dinner is finally over and you are stretched across a single bed in your flannie PJs, with the cassette player you got for your birthday tucked in beside you.

Then the song you have been waiting all week to catch finally comes on.

You lunge for the red button!

For the next week, you play that song until you absolutely hate it, then erase it to make room for your next great musical masterpiece.

By Grade 6, I had already swallowed the whole music propaganda pill.

The radio was my only outlet to the rest of the world, and every song that came through it felt like contraband.

My tapes were a glorious smorgasbord of ’90s hip-hop, R&B, whatever Top 40 guilty pleasure I could sneak onto them, and the songs I had learned by heart from Smash Hits.

Snoop Dogg, Salt-N-Pepa, MC Hammer, Vanilla Ice, Kris Kross, East 17 and Snow were all main characters on high rotation in my bedroom.

Snow was the Canadian rapper behind “Informer” (you-know-me-daddy-Snow-blam-a-licky-boom-boom-down) which none of us could sing correctly but somehow performed with absolute conviction.

These were my earliest days as a bootlegging music pirate.

The forgotten art of catching a song

Sometimes you caught the song perfectly. Other times, your treasured recording began with the tail end of a joke, a weather update or half a sentence you never asked for.

In hindsight, that was part of the charm.

But soon, stealing little pieces from the radio was not enough for my dopamine-hungry brain, and I wanted more from this faraway world behind my speakers.

When I was about 12, I called the local radio station for the first time to request “Finally” by CeCe Peniston, a song permanently linked to my first real crush after our school camp.

Somehow, that call also won me a XXXX beer pack.

I convinced my friend and her little brother to walk to the station with me and help lug home the prize pack, which included a six-pack of actual beer, a cooler bag, a T-shirt and assorted beer-branded loot.

Apparently nobody saw a problem with this.

By Year 11, my best friend and I were ringing triple j whenever we could, and presenter Jane Gazzo seemed more than happy to put us on air and let us say all the ridiculous things.

Once, my friend announced to the nation that the boy I was hopelessly in love with had “lost his swimming trunks in the pool at the school carnival today”, a detail she had simply plucked from thin air.

We were beside ourselves that our insignificant teenage lives had “briefly” been broadcast across Australia.

Somehow, radio is still part of mine.

I now talk music with former triple j presenter Sarah Howells on ABC Sunshine Coast every Tuesday while continuing to make mixtapes through YELO.

Some would say I have not changed much.

Step 1: Build a place to catch songs

More than 10 years ago, around the same time I became a single mum, I needed a system that was quick, simple and easy to keep up with.

In came the digital playlist.

I had not made a real mixtape since the cassette years, but this felt like my cue to bring the obsession back.

The cassette was gone, but the instinct was exactly the same: catch the song, save it and pass it around.

I am now up to Mixtape 24, not including the countless other playlists I have made for every possible person, mood and minor emergency.

They range from Mumma’s Angsty Car Music to Best Xylophone Solos or the classic Penny’s Happy Tracks, which earlier came on a CD if you were lucky enough to receive one.

Apparently my need to soundtrack absolutely everything had stood the test of time.

The first step is simply to give the songs somewhere to go. Build the infrastructure. Start with one playlist and keep adding to it. Do not wait until you have a theme, a clever title or a carefully considered musical direction.

The song comes first. The organising, and the heavy editing when you definitely DO NOT LIKE THAT SONG ANYMORE, can happen later.

Step 2: Save the song immediately

Songs now arrive from everywhere. And frankly, my memory sucks these days.

A local band catches my attention so I’ll save their biggest or latest song to my playlist. “Take that, Mixed Tape 24!”

I’ll fall in love with a song my daughter is playing way too many times on repeat (“Dracula – JENNIE Remix”, anyone?). “OK, that one can go on too.”

Sometimes a nostalgic ’80s banger comes over the speakers at Woolies and suddenly the frozen-food section feels cinematic. That one joins the list too, even if only temporarily.

The rule is simple: do not assume you will remember the song later. You will not.

Tap the title. Save it. Screenshot it. Shazam it. Write that shit down.

Sometimes I hear a song when I cannot check my phone, so I choose one line from the lyrics and repeat it inside my head until I can search for it. Life hacked.

The challenge is to hold onto the line without changing a word or allowing another thought to enter the building.

Then I type my slightly incorrect version into Google and hope it understands.

Shazam is easier, obviously, but whoever catches those things in time? Clearly, trying to remember random lines from unknown songs is much more fun.

Step 3: Let the playlist get messy

Each of my mixtapes begins innocently.

A musician I love releases something new, so onto the list it goes. Then one of my kids plays me something. Then a Sunshine Coast band catches my attention. A friend sends a recommendation. An algorithm quietly slides a track under my nose at 11.47pm when I should be asleep.

Before long, the playlist has grown legs and wandered in several different directions.

There might be noisy local punk beside some dreamy teenage pop, an old song I forgot existed, and something a child has played so often that resistance has become pointless.

That is exactly how I like it.

A mixtape should be a mixed bag of memories, chaos and fun.

Do not build it for an imaginary person with an enormous vinyl collection and extremely serious opinions.

Throw in the pop song you’d never admit to loving, the local band with 73 monthly listeners, the track that gets you through the gym, and the one that changes the way you drive.

The playlist should sound like your actual life.

Step 4: Let other people interfere

Some of the best songs on my mixtapes came from my children, friends, local artists and people who sent me recommendations.

A collaborative playlist lets them interfere directly.

Instead of another family group chat filled with messages about milk, missing chargers and why nobody has replied, make a shared playlist and let everyone add songs.

Move over, WhatsApp family chat.

The family can now ignore each other somewhere with a soundtrack.

You can do the same with friends. Build one for a road trip, a party, songs you all loved at 17 or music you believe the others urgently need in their lives.

The tracks will not always make sense together. That is what makes it good.

A mixtape does not need to sound professionally curated. It should sound like the people who made it.

Step 5: Make it weirdly specific

The best playlists are often the ones with the most ridiculous titles.

Mumma’s Angsty Car Music exists because sometimes a woman needs to drive around while processing several emotions at once.

Best Xylophone Solos exists because I became obsessively invested in the Violent Femmes.

The more specific the idea, the more useful the playlist becomes.

Make one for the songs your kids introduced you to, and one for the year you discovered eyeliner and Madonna. And you definitely need one for cleaning the house while furious that you’re not making mixtapes instead.

Make one for the songs that belonged to a particular car, house, friendship or version of yourself.

That is when a playlist stops being a pile of songs and starts becoming a memory.

Step 6: Edit it after it gets unruly

Do not overthink the playlist while you are building it. Throw everything in first, enjoy the process and worry about making sense of it later.

The cassette era certainly did not allow for this kind of recklessness, where every song consumed precious tape, and removing one could mean rebuilding the entire thing.

So this is your freedom moment and it deserves to be fully indulged.

Digital mixtapes are far less permanent. A song can disappear at the flick of a switch. Another can slide straight into its place. You can test a track for a week and delete it the moment it begins to annoy you.

So collect first and be ruthless later. Eventually, you will notice the songs you skip every time and the tracks that never quite earned their place.

Out they go. “Bye!”

The big edit is when you finally work out which songs still deserve to be there, like when you are suddenly done with the ’80s and far too moody for anything with a saxophone solo.

Until then, leave the gate open. A mixtape does not need a theme, unless that theme is persistent bad moods while driving. It becomes a record of where you were, who you were with and what managed to reach you at that point in your life.

Twenty-four mixtapes later, I am still doing exactly what I did on that single bed in 1993.

Waiting for the next song to arrive and getting ready to catch it before it disappears.

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