When my brother Pete and I were kids, and our parents were out of town, we ditched school for a week and cut an “album” by recording backing tracks to my dad’s reel-to-reel, then live overdubbing on different instruments and capturing the whole mess on a cassette recorder.

We didn’t know what we were doing, so we recorded the quiet, acoustic instruments first. Then we overdubbed electric organ and drums. Our second-pass instruments drowned out everything we’d recorded first. How we kept time is a mystery.