Most voicemail messages are often immediately deleted after a person listens and gets the gist. “Remember to get milk.” “Calling to check on your assignment.” “You are pre-qualified for a personal loan.” Quick and disposable. However, there are some voicemails that are too good or too important to delete.

A poster on Reddit asked the question:

“Does anyone else keep voicemails? I have so many I can’t delete. My favorite is my son in 2016 telling me in the sweetest little boy voice that he took a Lunchable out of the fridge and ate it even though it wasn’t lunch time. It may be the best voicemail I have ever heard.”

Funny or heartbreaking, each voicemail was important to the recipient

The commenters jumped in to discuss the important voicemails in their life that they’ll keep for as long as possible:

“I have one of my grandma and grandpa wishing me a happy birthday. I’m never deleting that.”

“I still have one from my friend’s little brother who left me a voicemail just to say he missed me. I was sick and stuck at home at the time and it genuinely made my whole day.”

“One of mine is just my friend laughing uncontrollably at something dumb I said and I refuse to delete it because it still makes me smile every time I hear it.”

@taragiordano2

10/10 recommend saving voicemails from those you love❤️ 8 years today. Listening to this voicemail never gets easier, but it reminds me of how loved I was by you, Dad. What i’d give for just one more moment with you. #griefjourney #grief ♬ original sound – Tara Giordano

“I have one from the sheriff’s office when my brake line blew somewhere down a mountain in Kentucky and my phone was dying, and my friend was frantically trying to help me 😂 Makes me laugh.”

“I have one from a friend who just came out of surgery, still doped up, demanding I help her acquire a pet duck. It was too random to delete.”

“My mom died two years ago. I have a voicemail of her singing “Soft Kitty” from Big Bang Theory. I can’t bring myself to listen to it but I’ll be damned if I ever delete it.”

“I have a birthday call from my Uncle Lyn, my parents’ best friend. It was the last birthday message I got from him before he passed away, and though I’m still sad I missed his call, at this point I’m glad I missed it too, cuz now I have it on a recording forever.”

“I’ve saved all the voicemails from my mom. They’re mostly her telling me what food she’s cooked and that I should come over and pick some up. She was taken off life support three days ago.”

“I have multiple voicemails from my mom 15 years ago. She had dementia and it just says, ‘It’s your mom, if you’re there pick up… Pick up, pick up, pick up. Okay well I love you, call me, bye.’”

Little kid voicemails are worth keeping

“My favorite voicemail that I refuse to delete is from my youngest child. Been saving it since June 2021. Any time I want I get to hear that darling voice say, ‘OK mom I just wanted to ask if I can have a cheese stick and also I have a song – music and lyrics by me. It’s called ‘The Cheese Song’. Pizza mozza-rella, pizza mozza-rella, la la la la la la. Pizza mozza-rella, pizza mozza-rella, la la la la la la. OK, love you. Have a great day. Byeeee.’ 🥹 That baby can have all the cheese sticks forever!”

“I have one saved from my son when he was five: ‘Daddy? When is… when you back from work? And you know what? I… I will always be there for you.’ And one of my three year old daughter meowing to herself (recorded over the babyphone) long after bed time.”

“I have one saved from my daughter from a couple of years ago. She starts the message by singing MAMA OOH OOOOH in the tune of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and then asks if she should leave the heating on because she’s going out soon.”

How can I save my voicemails permanently?

Many of the commenters lamented about losing some treasured voicemails, wishing they had known how to keep them. Fortunately, there are ways to help permanently save voicemails as back-ups. It’s good to do in case you lose your phone, switch cell phone providers, or delete them from your phone by accident. Depending on your device, you can save voicemails in the cloud, transfer them to a computer or other hard drive, or email them to yourself, too.

Among all of the voicemails from work or telemarketers, there are some “audio photographs” worth keeping. Whether it’s of a specific person or event that you wish to revisit and hear again. I can be important to hold onto them, especially if the recorded voice on the other end is someone that is no longer with us or a time capsule of a younger version of someone you love.

  • During one of Peter Gabriel’s final Genesis shows, a roadie got naked for one amazing prank
    Photo credit: Unknown photographer via Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Zero, Public Domain Dedication, cropped (left) / Canva (Africa images), cropped (right)A roadie got naked for a hilarious prank during one of Peter Gabriel's final shows with Genesis.

    The 1974 Genesis double-LP, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, is one of the most ambitious (and, to some, inscrutable) concept albums in rock history, following a character named Rael along a cosmic journey through the shadowy New York City streets, elaborate chambers of 32 doors, surreal cages filled with stalactites and stalagmites, underground rivers, and caves with spooky creatures. It was like a proggy Pilgrim’s Progress as envisioned by Alejandro Jodorowsky.

    When it came time to translate that vision to the concert stage, Genesis made a risky choice: debuting the entire 94-minute saga, front to back, with large chunks of the audience likely unfamiliar with the songs. (The first date of the tour, November 20, 1974 in Chicago, occurred two days before The Lamb hit stores.) The visual side of the project was as trippy as the lyrics, including scene-setting projections and a number of bizarre costumes for front man Peter Gabriel—like one particularly grotesque monstrosity, The Slipperman, that drummer Phil Collins later called an “inflatable dick.” (“It was all very Spinal Tap,” he said in an interview for the album’s 2007 reissue.) 

    If you ever wanted to appear naked onstage, this was probably the perfect time to do it—and one of the band’s roadies pulled off that hilarious prank as the tour neared its end. The silliness was especially notable, given the brooding atmosphere within Genesis—Gabriel, feeling constrained by the band’s schedule and eager to stretch his wings, had already informed his bandmates that he planned to leave following the Lamb tour. Perhaps the roadie, whom the band recalls being Geoff Banks, was attempting to add some levity. What we do know is that he made his nude cameo during one of the final shows, building on the suspense from a visual trick.

    “There was a point in The Lamb where Rael sort of splits, and we did that on stage,” Gabriel told filmmaker John Edginton in a full-band documentary interview. “I would be in the Rael outfit, and there was a dummy on the other side in exactly the same outfit. There wasn’t a lot of lighting, so it would explode, and you wouldn’t know [which was which]…Of course, for the crew, as we approached for the end of things—first of all, [Rael’s] jeans would have their flies undone with a banana hanging out. Gradually, they’d have more and more fun…”

    Keyboardist Tony Banks also talked about this infamous moment in a passage from the 2007 book Genesis: Chapter and Verse. “No one apart from the group, and the immediate circle of the group, knew that Pete was leaving and that this could well be our last tour ever,” he said. “And the roadies always had to have some fun. There was this moment in the show where Pete would be on one side of the stage with a dummy on the other side, and the strobe lights would flash on them so you couldn’t tell which was which. And, of course, for one of the last shows, one of the roadies got up there naked on the other side and took up the pose in place of the dummy…There were people watching this, my wife, for instance, practically in tears because they thought that it might be all over for Genesis, and we had a naked roadie on stage[—]was this how it was all going to end?”

    But all’s well that ends well, and Genesis managed to carry on after Gabriel’s departure by upgrading Collins to the dual role of drummer-singer. In a testament to their continued friendship, Genesis even reunited with their old singer in 1982 to help him escape mounting debts. 

    This article originally appeared last year. It has been updated.

  • 41 years ago Bono’s Live Aid stage antics ended up saving a female fan from being crushed
    Photo credit: Screenshot from YouTube / @LiveAidU2 singer Bono embraces a fan pulled out of the crowd during the band's 1985 performance at Live Aid.

    By July 13, 1985, U2 was a massively popular rock band: riding the wave of two successive chart-topping U.K. albums (War and The Unforgettable Fire), even being anointed the “Band of the ’80s” in a Rolling Stone cover story. But their definitive moment of that year was a performance at Live Aid, a benefit for Ethiopian famine relief staged before 72,000 at London’s Wembley Stadium and broadcast to well over 1 billion TV viewers. They were already larger than life, but now they had the perfect venue and grandiose crowd interaction to showcase it.

    Their short set featured a 12-minute version of their atmospheric 1984 song “Bad,” which they stretched out to include some quotes from The Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday” and, more famously, to accommodate the stage maneuvering of front man Bono. Halfway through the track, the singer gestured to the audience with a “come on”-type motion, eventually requesting a few female audience members be lifted out of the crowd by security.

    According to some accounts, including viral social media posts, this was some kind of “rescue” attempt, and while it’s unclear precisely why Bono took action, the story has become a staple of the U2 canon.

    In the above clip, you’ll see two fans guided to the apron area in front of the stage, where Bono briefly embraces them. But the most notable moment is when he jumps into the muddy area by the barricade, asking security to hoist over a teenager, with whom he slow-dances and offers a kiss on the cheek. Cameras, of course, caught the whole thing. Bono was a showman from day one, after all.

    Over the years, there’s been a lot of debate and discussion about this Bono-meets-fan moment. In a detailed breakdown of the performance, Rolling Stone reports that the third fan was 15-year-old Kal Khalique. Someone by that name shared their Live Aid memories with the BBC, writing that they weren’t even at the show to see U2: “My sister and I were desperate to see Wham!, so we had made it down to the front of the stage. Half way through the day U2 came on suddenly Bono was pointing to me in the crowd and after a [number] of other girls were pulled out, he finally jumped down and got the security guys to pull me out and danced and hugged me, and I even got a kiss. I’ve been a huge U2 fan ever since.”

    In 2011, The Guardian cited an article by The Sun, who apparently tracked down Khalique. “The crowd surged,” she reportedly claimed, “and I was suffocating—then I saw Bono.” But The Guardian also notes that Bono “had long made a habit of pulling girls out of the audience and dancing with them.” Was this just another example, only amplified by the drama of a hungry rock band playing the biggest stage imaginable? 

    Reasoning aside, it’s the kind of larger-than-life moment that came to define U2. It also happened at an ideal time, just ahead of their next album, 1987’s The Joshua Tree, a critically acclaimed and multi-platinum blockbuster that topped the Billboard 200 and spawned some of the bands most enduring singles, including “When the Streets Have No Name,” “With or Without You,” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”

    Live Aid also spawned one of rock’s most celebrated performances ever: Queen’s triumphant eight-track set featuring anthems like “We Are the Champions,” “Radio Ga Ga,” and “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.” That show was even etched into film history with an exacting recreation in the 2018 Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody

    This article originally appeared last year. It has been updated.

  • Catherine O’Hara’s tear-jerking eulogy for John Candy was a master class in memorializing a true friend
    ,

    Catherine O’Hara’s tear-jerking eulogy for John Candy was a master class in memorializing a true friend

    Now that O’Hara has also passed, the beautiful words she spoke for Candy resonate in a new and painful way.

    The comedy world lost two of its great lights decades apart. John Candy in 1994, and Catherine O’Hara on January 30, 2026. But O’Hara left something behind from that first loss: a nine-minute eulogy that remains one of the most moving tributes one friend has ever paid another.

    Candy was the big-hearted comic-actor best known for his string of charismatic film roles in the 1980s and early 1990s, from Stripes to Planes, Trains, and Automobiles to Uncle Buck. He died at just 43 in 1994, following a heart attack. O’Hara, his close friend and collaborator from SCTV, Second City Toronto, and Home Alone, delivered the eulogy at his memorial service in Toronto, and in nine minutes she managed to capture everything that made him irreplaceable.

    She opened the beautiful eulogy by summarizing all of the ways he “enriched” other people’s worlds, including so many small acts of kindness.

    “I know you all have a story,” she says in the clip. “You asked him for his autograph, and he stopped to ask you about you. You auditioned for Second City, and John watched you smiling, laughing. And though you didn’t get the job, you did get to walk away thinking, ‘What do they know? John Candy thinks I’m funny.’ You walked behind John to communion. You carried his bags up to his hotel room, and he said, ‘Hey, that’s too heavy. Let me get that for you.’ And then he tipped you. Or was that a day’s pay?…you caught a John Candy scene on TV one night, right when you needed to laugh more than anything in the world.” 

    Meeting John Candy

    O’Hara also shares her own story of meeting Candy in 1974, when he was director of the Second City touring company.

    “When I joined him in the main cast, he drove us all the way to Chicago to play their Second City stage,” O’Hara recalls. “And I had a crush on him, of course, but he was deeply in love with [his wife, Rosemary]. So I got to be his friend, and I closed the Chicago bars with him, just to be with him. We did SCTV together. When we all tried to come up with opening credits that would somehow tell the audience exactly what we were trying with the show to say about TV, it was John who said, ‘Why don’t we just throw a bunch of TVs off a building?’”

    The whole eulogy is filled with lovely details, as O’Hara reflects on Candy’s graciousness, his collaborative spirit, and the overall sparkle of his comedy.

    “His movies are a safe haven for those of us who get overwhelmed by the sadness and troubles of this world,” she says. “As if he knew he’d be leaving us soon, John left us a library of fun to remember him by.”

    And she ends with a moving note to illustrate their closeness: “God bless, dear John, our patron saint of laughter. God bless and keep his soul. I will miss him. But I hope and pray to leave this world too some day and to have a place near God—as near as any other soul, with the exception of John Candy.” 

    The Candy legacy

    After the eulogy video resurfaced on Reddit, dozens of fans shared their emotions.

    “I was eight years old when he passed, and to this day no celebrity death has ever hit me harder,” one user wrote. “How could such a bright light be gone so early? She’s right, his films are a safe haven for the soft-hearted. RIP.” Another added, “John Candy died over 30 years ago, but it still stings like it was yesterday. He left such an incredible and rare cultural mark.”

    Candy was also the subject of the 2025 Amazon Prime documentary John Candy: I Like Me, directed by Colin Hanks and produced by Ryan Reynolds, in which O’Hara herself appears alongside other friends and collaborators. Conan O’Brien has talked frequently about how much he loved the SCTV star; he once talked to Howard Stern about his impactful meeting with Candy back in 1984, when O’Brien was a 21-year-old student at Harvard University (and president of the Harvard Lampoon).

    “We ended up hanging out,” O’Brien recalled, “and what I remember most clearly is that he was everything I wanted him to be. He was John Candy.” 

    This article originally appeared last year. It has been updated.

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