Baked Tapes is a quiet, time-spanning novel about music, memory, and the ghosts that linger after the music ends. When Lyle Bass—a once-promising Midwestern Gen X songwriter now in his mid-50s—uncovers a deteriorating reel-to-reel tape from his scrappy indie-rock years, it pulls him back into decades of buried ambition, creative obsession, and unresolved relationships. As Lyle attempts to restore the tape—literally baking it to keep it from falling apart— Baked Tapes moves between eras: youthful demo days, fleeting artistic success, long creative droughts, and a present-day collision with a younger generation who plays by entirely different rules. Along the way, the novel explores friendship and rivalry, love and estrangement, and questions about the dark side of nostalgia. At its core, Baked Tapes is a story of love and loss—and of the way our personal history can grab hold and never let go. Told with restraint and emotional precision, it is not a story about fame, but about the pull of the past—what it means to keep creating long after the spotlight has moved on. It will resonate with musicians, writers, and anyone who has carried a private project through years of doubt, wondering if the result was worth the cost. Baked Tapes is Bob Christenson’s debut novel.