When the news came through that Taylor Hawkins, legendary drummer for the Foo Fighters, had passed away — I was in shock. Honestly, I’m still in shock… My career really started as a digital whiz kid in the sacred walls of the Foo Fighters management company: SAM aka Silva Artist Management. It was there I had the opportunity to work for some of the greatest artists in music but also some of the kindest, hardest working managers and staff. I created a second family. My heart was broken, not only for Taylor, his family, and his fans, but also for all of my old colleagues whose responsibility it is to pick up the pieces before having their opportunity to properly mourn.

In the 24 hours that immediately proceeded the news of Taylor’s passing, I decided to rebuild an application I developed in 2010 for his then new record Red Light Fever. For whatever reason, we were obsessed with 8-Track players at that time and I began recording modern albums to 8-Track for fun. To support the record’s release, we developed a digital 8-Track player that could playback a low quality 8-Track version of a few tracks off the record. So, I headed to the Wayback Machine and luckily found a cached version of all of the visual assets. I then shared the journey of redeveloping the app from scratch over a series of tweets. I even found some old photos of my desk from then.

As it turns out, this build was much more complicated than I remembered and it was a lot of fun deciding on modern solutions for some of the components. For example, the vertical volume and balance levers were now constructed with range inputs rotated 90 degrees. The draggable tape and insert slot was now developed with Hammer.js and Greensock. Finally, Howler was used to handle all audio functionality including the stereo balance. Rather than go through each component on this blog, I’ve open-sourced the entire

Since this session, I’ve taken a closer look at some of my projects which are nearing their decade+ anniversaries. I plan on revisiting some of these and have coined a new term: Nostalgia Hacking. In the case of Taylor, it was very cathartic to bring something back after having just lost him. Moments like this remind me of how lucky I’ve been to have had the opportunity to work for legends like Taylor and for all of those folks who keep the rock n’ roll machine running. My thoughts go out to Taylor’s family and all those he touched. RIP.