The Four-Track That Changed Everything
How a cassette machine and a castmate made me a composer
In the early 1980s, I was performing on Broadway in Dreamgirls at the Imperial Theatre — a company that included some of the most gifted performers of our generation. People who would go on to win Tonys, Emmys, and define what Black excellence on the American stage could look like. Also in the cast was my dear friend Bobby Daye.
Bobby is a Capricorn. Capricorns have the horns — they have a way of butting their friends forward, refusing to let you settle, pushing you toward things you might never have reached on your own. Bobby knew I was a budding songwriter. So one day he pulled me aside and said: Lee, you’ve got to get this new device called the Fostex four-track.
I got it.
That machine cracked open a door I didn’t know existed. The first song I ever recorded on it was with Bobby — a song I had written called Could You Be My Lover Tonight? I had come of age in the cassette era, I knew music, I loved music. But this was different. For the first time, I could layer voices. I could hear myself in multiples. I could build something.
That four-track didn’t just teach me to record. It taught me to compose.
What began backstage at the Imperial would eventually lead me to write full musicals — From My Hometown, and Funketine Rapture (A Funk Fable), of which I am composer and lyricist. Selected for the NAMT Festival in 2005, Funketine Rapture is now on its way to Broadway in 2026.
After graduating from the four-track, I moved on to a TASCAM eight-track. Decades later in 2025, while securing rights for Concord Theatricals and going down the rabbit hole of today’s music industry, I decided to return to the vault and release some of those old recordings as an experiment.
The result is Soulriginals, a collection of songs rescued from analog tapes and long-forgotten hard drives, now available on all streaming platforms.
If you enjoy dusty, analog, cassette-driven sounds with unmistakably no AI and completely human fingerprints all over them, give them a listen.
