Gift: Audio Birthday Card
It’s a birthday card that you listen to!
This is part of a series called…
… where you’ll find ideas for fun games, gifts or gatherings that can create meaningful experiences with your friends, family and community.
This series is like a cookbook for connection, full of recipes and illustrated examples.
Each game, gift or gathering is a unique experience I’ve created or adapted from a beloved classic.
Previous Posts:
Let me know if you try out any of these ideas.
I’d love to share your experience in a future post!
Ok…continue reading if you want to make a gift that gets this kind of reaction from your loved ones…
Inspiration
In the early 2000s, I relied on my landline telephone with a built-in answering machine to stay in touch with long distance friends and family.
The audio messages on my machine were early examples of audio that I deemed worthy of collecting and archiving.
Here’s a message from my archive of my mom leaving me a message in 2002. You’ll hear me pick up the phone at the very end and it’s still recording, which was a bug in some machines back then.
BEEP
Mom: Hey Evan, it’s 8:09 in the morning. Time to get up! It’s your mother!
Evan: (groggy) …Mommmm?….
The best voicemail to receive (and archive) were from drunk friends wanting to start a fight!
BEEP
Drunk Girl: Listen you little slut. I can’t believe you like Britney Spears because I’m so much hotter. If you really like her, I will fucking cut your nut sack off. I love you, but I can’t love you if you love her. So fucking call me back. Bye.
By 2007, if I wanted to save a funny voicemail, I’d put my flip phone on speaker mode and use my professional Marantz recorder to capture the audio by pointing an omnidirectional mic at the phone.
This is around the time that I started to dream up a new kind of birthday gift.
I was a broke radio producer/waiter with too many friends who had 30th birthdays coming up. The only gift I could afford to give them was my time and creativity.
What could I make in Pro Tools that would only take a few hours - and that packed an emotional punch?
I decided to solicit voicemails from the friends and family of the friend celebrating a birthday, and edit their stories with music into an audio collage.
I called it an Audio Card.1
Eventually, Audio Cards were one service I would offer for friends and family, as part of my side hustle / small business, Audio Heirlooms.
I sent the first few Audio Cards in the mail to friends in the form of an unassuming compact disc.
Perhaps they thought it was a bday mix CD?
Here is a message from a friend who called me immediately after listening, clearly emotional…
Crying Girl: It’s amazing. I’m totally bawling. I can’t believe you made that…. Thank you.
Here’s my CD design for Bill’s Audio Card.
In 2009, I made a short audio piece for a friend's wedding of voicemails from family members who could not attend the wedding, including a grandmother who was too frail to travel.
“If your loved ones can’t make it in person, at least their voice can be in the room” was how I framed it.
We played the audio collage during the reception as dinner was served.
A friend of the groom, actress Kimberly Williams-Paisley, was there and loved the idea. She came by my table to ask me about the process. A few months later, she hired me to do an Audio Card for her best friend's 40th birthday, the wife of an Olympic ice-skater Scott Hamilton.
Both left testimonials:
Hi, this is Kimberly Williams-Paisley. I gave my friend Tracie an Audio Card for her 40th Birthday. It was by far the most unique gift I’ve ever given…. It was really a great way to embrace Tracy and include everybody who had been a part of her surprise.
It was just a really unique gift and she loved it!
It’s Scott Hamilton, and you recently produced an Audio Card for my wife’s 40th birthday… We played it at her surprise party and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.…This is an extraordinary gift and one that stands the test of time.
Evan, you’re a genius. Thank you for making my wife’s birthday so special.
I made Audio Cards for friends and strangers:
A Birthday Card for Toni, a woman I met at a communal picnic table in Marfa.
A 50th Anniversary Card for the Silverteins, two Berkeley grads who met at a free speech protest on campus.
A 75th Birthday Card for a friend of a friend’s father.
An audio collage of memories at a friend's mother’s memorial service.
If you have the time, some technical skill and access to the tools and resources in the How To and Budget sections, you can absolutely make an audio card for someone special in your life.
Feel free to reach out to me for help!
One last testimonial - a favorite - from a recipient of an Audio Birthday Card:
I was given the magical gift of the Audio Card. And if you were me, you would know what it means to feel infinitely wealthy.
It was quite a shock to hear all of the lovely messages. The love and the friendship and the generosity all poured into one single audio recording. I have to say I was paralyzed by all of it.
It’s funny… I’m at work right now, and I was listening to it in my car on the way in and it has helped me have a much nicer day.
We all deserve a gift this good - and if every person did receive a gift like this? The world would be a completely different and better place.
EXAMPLES FROM THE ARCHIVE
The best part about the Audio Card process is being there when it’s played for the recipient.
I made an Audio Card for my sister’s 50th birthday earlier this year.
As everyone started on their ice cream dessert, I connected my phone to her Sonos speaker and played the 45-minute audio file I had saved on my phone.
She said she had suspected something when earlier I had discreetly dropped a box of tissues on the dinner table.
In 2020, I made an Audio Anniversary Card for my parents 50th wedding Anniversary. I was able to track down an old friend of theirs who they had lost touch with after a divorce. Here’s their reaction to hearing her voice while FaceTiming with me:
Here’s my favorite message captured for someone’s Audio Birthday Card.
It’s successful because it takes a somewhat mundane memory - a dinner during a vacation - and uses this story to illustrates what kind of person Jess is, rather than simply telling us.
When in doubt: Show, don’t Tell.
I’m including a transcript but it’s more fun to listen to!
Hey, Jessa, this is one of your travel buddies here. I'm going to share a little story from the time both of us traveled to France together because I think that in a small way, it reflects you very well.
So when Jessa and I were in Bordeaux, we decided to go to a Michelin star restaurant because you know, it's France, it's Bordeaux. And because we were already out of control with our spending - we got our flights upgraded, we picked up fancy Airbnbs - Jess had a moment of clarity, or maybe guilt, and he informed me that dinner would be a reasonable affair, as he put it, and we will not go overboard, especially with drinking.
So we get there and we actually picked a relatively small five-course menu and settled on one bottle of wine… and we agreed that that would be our only booze for the night.
Dinner was going great. The food was fantastic and we're pacing well with the wine, feeling very good with ourselves. So at one point, dessert arrives and we're almost done, but then we see the maître d is rolling on a cart… a giant bottle with something that looks like red wine towards another table. The thing was huge. It was probably six or seven gallons. They literally had to roll it out.
So I see Jess looking greedily at the wine and I give him a “Don't you dare look” and he says in an innocent high pitched voice “I'm only gonna ask what it is.” So after the maître d leaves the table Jess calls him and asks him. “Excuse me, What's this?” pointing at the wine. So the maître d, seeing two dumb tourists, is giving us a good sales pitch about it, telling us that it's a rare port that, I don't know, made by blind nuns that took a vow of silence and it's only sold in the restaurant, whatever.
Jess's eyes are shining with lust, and in the moment the maître d is done, he says, “We'll take two.” I just swallowed my eyes, and I agree. So, we get it, and we drink the port, which is to be fair, quite good. It's a small port - like three ounce per person. So a few minutes later we get the bill and the two portions of that world renowned port are actually 130 euros… basically killing our plans to be reasonable for the night.
I glare at Jess who really looks like he's in shock and he knows I'm about to kill him. So having very little to lose, he looks at me defiantly and says, “I regret nothing.”
And I think that's Jessa in a nutshell. He's responsible, considerate, measured, until one moment he flips and he's not. And he's happy to make bad, messy decisions, but in a complete adorable way. And I guess I wouldn't want him in any other way.
So, happy birthday, Jess. I love you, and I can't wait to make more dumb decisions the next time we travel together.
I will leave you with one more example from an Audio Birthday Card.
This message is the exception to my rule against reading something pre-written.
She uses a moment in their friendship to extract a meaningful insight about Bill’s character and his impact on his friends and community.
Happy birthday, Bill.
A favorite memory of you that I have occurred when you were exactly one half your present age and you traveled to visit friends and family, including Art and me, to come out to us as a gay man.
I remember so well how wonderful and calm and happy you were and that you wore a little heart pin on the sleeve of your sport coat. You literally were wearing your heart on your sleeve.
And it strikes me that this is the fundamental and unique, amazing quality about you. That as you travel through life, your greatest gift to all of us lucky enough to call you dear husband, son, brother, uncle, or friend, is that you've lived your life with an openness and an honesty and a fearlessness, wearing your heart on your sleeve, as you've struggled with what it means to be a fully spiritual and physical being on this earth. And that in that process, you've inspired each of us, lucky enough to be in your orbit, to be a little more open and honest and less fearful as we travel on our own journeys of self discovery and self knowledge and spirituality.
I know that wearing your heart on your sleeve hasn't been easy. But for all of us that have been inspired by your life, I want to thank you, my dear, sweet, and now year 60-year-old friend.
Make a list of people to invite
Email templates for invitations below…