The voice memo graveyard

My phone has a folder that nobody else will ever hear, and it's the most important thing on it.

It's all voice memos. There are hundreds. Most are under thirty seconds long, and almost all were recorded somewhere I shouldn't have been singing. I've got them from parking lots and from the shoulder of the Tamiami Trail. One is from a grocery store aisle, recorded quietly, facing the cereal. They have names like "new one fast" and "chorus maybe" and, once, just "NO."

Ninety percent of them are nothing. A melody that sounded like a hit at a red light turns out, on playback, to be a song I already wrote, or somebody else's song, or a man humming in a car.

But every so often I go digging through the old ones and something from eight months ago is sitting there, fully alive. I have no memory of recording it. It's rough and off-key and there's a turn signal ticking under it, and it's better than anything I wrote that week.

That's why I never delete them. The version of me who recorded it was paying attention to something I've since forgotten. The memo remembers it for me.

If you write anything at all, songs or poems or grocery lists with ambitions, keep the bad recordings. You're not the best judge of them the day you make them. Give them a few months. Some of them are waiting for you to catch up.