Grab a coffee, take a quick five minute break from what you’re doing, and settle in with me for a hot minute.

I want to share a story with you of the incredible, unsung portions of our life paths that have forged us into people we never believed could be so strong or capable.

Many of those portions were flash-of-genius moments where we were able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, and create phenomenal outcomes with our sheer determination, grit, and unrelenting belief in what we and others were doing.

If you’ve ever been part of something like that—it’s very special. And you’ll never forget it.

In a world where Ai is touted as the way a person authors a book, writes a song, creates a storyboard, starts a business plan (look at the Google assistant ad, it’s a little scary)—I’m wondering about the health of our ingenuity and our grittiness; I have concerns when I look to the future, regarding people’s belief in themselves and their own ability to not only think outside the box, yet trouble-shoot, and in short—create stunning new outcomes and directions.

“What’s new?” and “What do you have coming up next?” are solid inquiries in conversation. Our need to know what folks have brewing in their life path seems to be an American quirk—I didn’t run into that “tell me your next big thing” propensity when I’ve traveled abroad.

It got me thinking about how we are so trained to look toward to our “next big venture” in the USA that sometimes we fail to really soak in the impact that our past has had on the incredible being we’ve become.

Now I’m not talking about losing oneself in the deep well of past glory days and getting stuck there. That’s a form of escapism and growth avoidance.

I’m talking about taking a moment to see where we’ve been, and how that’s helped form us into who we are.

What have we all done in our lives? So, so much. Incredible amounts, most of which we forget as time marches on.

Or, worse, we discount it.

This piece of paper below dates back to February 22nd 1996. It’s a snapshot in time of a David-and-Goliath moment in my own personal music history.

This paper was in a stack of Pope Jane memorabilia that I keep in what has been called “the black suitcase”, a briefcase full of late-nights at Kinkos, photos, snips and bits of press releases, news clipping, cassette sticky-labels, old table-toppers for New Year’s Eve gigs— it’s a bag that documents years’ worth of concrete building blocks, whose energy is just dripping with excitement and possibility, and unrelenting vision and hard work.

I keep the memorabilia because it is an homage to starting something from scratch, and working incredibly hard against ridiculously nearly-insurmountable odds to take something from the inside of your heart—out to the rest of the world.

Literally.

This paper below? It started that journey. I never forgot the moment that this paper documented.

I was 26 years old. Pope Jane had just recorded our first self-titled album, which was very difficult to achieve back in the day. We released the album on cassettes that we duplicated ourselves.

It was an insanely time-consuming process, from not only the tape-duping, which took time (remember having to flip over the tape??) , but also to the physical assembly of the cassettes.

Were there places that would duplicate cassettes? Sure! We just couldn’t afford a run of dupes at the time, which was a couple thousand dollars for 1,000 cassettes.

So by-hand it was.

I hand-laid-up the tape jacket insert. We’re talking glue sticks, scotch tape, and sharp scissors. Again, the only computers were ones you rented time on, at Kinkos. It was a cut-n-paste world for we starving artists back then.

Once I got our tape jacked designed where you wanted it, glue-stick in hand, i’d take it up to the Kinkos guy and get multiple tape jackets color-copied onto one 8.5 x 11 piece of paper, to save money.

Then I’d hand cut-out each tape jacket insert on those big paper-slicer things. (Because having Kinkos cut them added money I didn’t have to spend.)

Next, me or Kristen or Rita would meticulously fold up the tape jacket and insert it into the tape shell. I had a “folding template” I made and used because this was a crazy-precise thing, and if you messed it up, you wasted a tape jacket.

Again, refer back to the “starving artist” part of the story.

Back in the day I designed the fancy fold-out tape inserts (which were called J-cards because they were shaped like a J once folded up) so folks could read lyrics. We were really uptown, man, lol!

It was then time to apply the cassette sticky-label, whose song titles had been manually typed onto them by me on my Grandpa Louie’s old typewriter, and Kinkos would copy a sheet of them. So you’d peel and stick “Side A” and “Side B” labels on the cassettes.

Once that was all done, I took the assembled cassettes up to Aardvark film and video, in the heights, and they’d shrink wrap the cassettes for a dime a piece.

So each cassette probably had over an hour of production time into them.

We sold them for $5.

And of course, there was no duplicated cassette without recording an album.

You have to remember, there were no “today’s ease-of-use” computer programs that you could record your tracks with. No drag-and-drop loops or beats. There were no smart phones in 1996. Hardly anyone had personal computers in 1996, unless you were a business person.

To record an album, you bought studio time. That is, if you could afford it.

We couldn’t.

In a studio recording land back in 1996, digital recordings were just barely coming out. DAW (recording) Programs like Pro-Tools were in their infancy in the recording studio system. Digital recordings sounded too crisp, overly-cold. The kinks were still being ironed out with that.

So it was all mostly recording in analogue, either reel-to-reel tape, or a then-new-technology that came and went, called A-DAT, where you audio recorded to a VHS tape.

Incase you’re someone who is not familiar with tape, it’s an electromagnetic strip that is imprinted with sound waves. You never wanted to set a tape down by a strong magnet, or it would erase the tape. True story.

Anyway, we recorded our first Pope Jane album on a Tascam 4-Track cassette multitrack recorder that years prior, drummer Kristen had bought for me for my birthday.

Kristen knew how to audio engineer, as that’s what she learned at the then-Art Institute of Seattle. I learned audio engineering from years of observing when being recorded by others.

If you were a musician who could engineer, you opened up an entirely different world to yourself. It was like learning to write novels, for a reader.

The Tascam 4-Track was a MOST RAD gift back then, I’ll have you know. It meant we could do anything because it meant that we had 4 different tracks to layer up a recording on.

Except in Pope Jane, we had 16 tracks of instrumentation by the time you mic’ed up everybody plus the drums.

So to achieve this 16-track recording on a 4-Track, Pope Jane had to record live by going through 16 tracks on a soundboard that I had mix together in order to get a perfect sound balance sent to a stereo output—a live mix to two stereo tracks.

Because those 16 tracks had to get combined (or “mixed down”) to two stereo tracks. On a 4-track Tascam cassette recorder, you’d need to leave two open tracks to add vocals or lead guitar lines or whatever, later.

If somebody messed up while we were recording, the whole band had to start from scratch. No punching in just the bass or guitar. If was a full re-do, all live or all nothing.

In order for me to hear all this, because the band was in Holly’s daylight basement (our rehearsal space), I had to step outside the sliding glass door with my headphones attached to a long cable that fed into the four track recorder, so I could hear the mix in my headphones outside—all while Kristen pounded away on her drums, and Holly slapped away on her bass, and Rita pounded on her guitar inside.

I was wearing my guitar outside, too, and I would close the sliding glass door to cut the noise, to try to get a reasonable mix in the headphones.

I’d go in and out of the house, adjusting this, or panning that. It had to be perfect, or we’d have to start over.

Anyway. We got the 16-tracks-to-2-Tracks issue covered, I took the 4-track Tascam home and added vocals and lead instrument parts. Then I mixed it all to what’s called a “Master Tape” that’s used to duplicate from.

And now to the paper from 1996.

After going through all of this handmade manufacturing with the cassettes, it was tough to find a place to sell them. Remember—there was no Spotify, no Pandora. No Apple Music, no Google play.

MP3s wouldn’t be invented until 1998, two years later.

Nope, we had to go door-to-door in retail, and ask if there were shops that were willing to consign very small amounts of our cassette. In this case, five of them at a time.

I walked into a small eclectic store in downtown Billings, Barjon’s Books, which at the time was located where Soup and Such is now. The store had music and crystals and books— I felt like they may artist-friendly.

I met Barbara Shenkel, who was the owner, and I pitched her the idea of putting our tapes on consignment. She said she absolutely would, and you literally would’ve thought somebody offered me a distribution deal through Tower records. (God rest its soul).

Barjons Books (and music!) was the very first place to commercially sell our product. Ever.

Barbara Shenkel at Barjon’s gave me the confidence as a 26-year-old person, to then go to Cactus Records up in Bozeman, and other stores around Billings, and the country, to place our cassettes.

I put Holly down on this receipt, as the point of contact, because Holly’s then-husband was also doing some booking for us, so I figured I’d try to keep all the band business and one spot. But indeed, I was the one who had the honor of pitching to Barbara Shenkel why it would be a good idea to put five cassettes in her store, that belonged to an all female local band, who was trying to make it big.

Looking back on it, she probably didn’t think it was that big of a deal, and it probably was no skin off her nose to put five cassettes up on the shelf. However, I could see in her eyes when we talked, that she knew that it meant the world to me, to be able to have a retail outlet for our music.

And she wasn’t wrong.

Because we had one store that believed in us, I was able to get lots and lots and lots of other distribution for these cassettes.

Pretty soon we had far more distribution than we had time to make cassettes, and we were off to our first pressing of our next CD in 1998, whose title was “Relief”, recorded at the then-May Technical Collage. Michael May believed in our band and we were able to use our recording process as a learning tool for students. It was pretty cool.

I could then take these CDs we recorded at May Tech to the same stores whose connections I had made through the cassette distribution, and place the CD’s too.

Those cassettes. They were the great ice-breakers, busting apart a frozen sea of inaccessibility.

In a world where everything is published to the Internet instantly, it may be hard to recall a world where physical recordings were special, and precious, and there were plenty of gate keepers and hurdles to cling over, just to get your music out there.

And in fine form, Barbara Schenkel at Barjon’s also took on Relief CD’s, on consignment.

Now, years later, you can still stream Pope Jane’s “Relief” on Spotify and iTunes music, as well as dozens of other streamers. In fact, you can also stream Pope Jane’s other CD, “Hide Me From The Moon”, which came out in 2000, one year later, and was recorded at a very fancy studio in Seattle that the band was flown out for.

Yet this receipt.

This old receipt stuffed in my black suitcase, with all the Pope Jane memories.

This little piece of paper that has the wishes and the hopes and the dreams of a 26-year-old me, pinned right to it, and all the rest of us in Pope Jane—the little band full of BIG spitfire talented girls, that was going to take over the world, before girls were allowed to take over the world in music.

This receipt reminds me of what I am capable of. Of what we were capable of.

This receipt reminds me of what we’re all capable of, when we have the support of people who believe in us.

It reminds me of what we are all capable of, when we come together in common cause, and focus on our genius, and our ability, rather than our insecurities, weaknesses, or what divides us.

Five cassettes. Consigned. Giving four gals at the time—me, Kristen, Holly, and Rita—the confidence to keep going, the confidence to end up years later recording in Seattle, playing with Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart, Joan Jett, Loverboy, Kenny Chesney, Mark Chestnut, Ted Nugent— and so many others.

This is the power of effort. It’s the power of belief, especially the belief of someone else, in you.

Sure, it’s the power of a ton of rehearsal and a lot of dedication. But it’s also the power of community, lifting us all up, when we’re trying so hard to pour our heart into the world.

Thank you for listening to my story today. It’s allowed me to reflect back on some incredible strengths that quite honestly, I had forgotten I even had.

Life marches forward; our modern lives are so full of convenience, and sometimes it’s easy to forget that some of the greatest headway we’ve ever made, some of the most complex terrain we’ve ever traversed, was in the basement of a little house clear out in a prairie, trying desperately to smash too many tracks onto a cassette, or spending hours at a Kinkos, gluing and pasting and folding and trying not to cut your fingertips off making precise lines with the paper cutter—or the pride in having a dollar in your pocket to shrink wrap 10 cassette tapes.

In honor of this cassette, which really did launch us (and as a sidenote, I was actually given $500 for one of these cassettes by a guy who wandered into Casey’s during one of our shows, who was fresh off the oil fields in Wyoming, and he was so impressed with the band) —

—in honor of “the little cassette that could—and did”, I have digitally remastered this almost 30-year-old cassette, and am issuing 100 of them on a USB drive that looks exactly like the cassette. They’ll be $16 at our show on March 2nd.

Because these were great songs. And the artistry it took to get them perfect in one take was a reflection of the fact that we rehearsed four days a week back then. The pride we had in our art was shared by all of us.

All these years later, though it’s been since 2008 that Pope Jane has played together—I’m just so damn proud of this band, and what it has brought to me in my life, which far exceeded music—fellowship, family, fabulousness, film and TV opportunities —and the love and the awe that this little cassette has brought to my spirit…well, let’s put it to you this way:

Of all the four Pope Hane recordings, this little cassette was my favorite recording, and Holly’s favorite recording, and Kristen‘s favorite recording.

This little cassette.

As I said to the band back in that funny little prairie basement, while a very-expensive-for-us-back-in-the-day $7.00 dollar master cassette was playing in the Tascam 4- track, degrading in quality every time we had to record over it—

“The tape is rolling, you guys.”

This was code for “let’s shut up and get moving and not waste any more time or tape”. I’ll never forget Kristen’s comment from behind the drums—

“It’s a CASSETTE. Gawd!”

Indeed. And what a cassette it was!

The tape is rolling, everybody. It’s rolling out every day of our lives, and eventually we will reach the end of our A-side, then we reach the end of our B-side—and it will be time to move onto another format, entirely.

We are works of art, each one of us. And evolution is the nature of art anyway, right?