Totally On Track Podcast

In this episode of Totally On Track, I’m heading back to early 80s California, a teenage skive into San Francisco, The Quake on the radio, and a song by an English band that became one of my all time favourites.

It’s part new wave love song, part radio memory, part teenage nerve. There’s the Warfield Theatre, a slightly awkward attempt to meet the band, a few favourite cover versions, and the added ache of the album later becoming one of the records stolen from my vinyl collection.

Sometimes the song stays sharper than the memory around it.

Enjoy the ride.

Subscribe to ‘Totally On Track’ for music as milestones, songs that struck a chord, and short personal stories about the tracks that stay with us.

In Episode 9 of Totally On Track, I’m featuring a more recent song from a Minneapolis band that stopped me in my tracks the first time I heard it.

What begins as a quirky lyric about CDs turns into something surprisingly touching about love, legacy, and the things we choose to leave behind. Because sometimes the most meaningful inheritance isn’t money or jewellery. It’s the music that shaped us, the albums we treasured, and the memories attached to every song.

A modern love song with a line that feels as if it was written specifically for music collectors. Hope you enjoy it.

Episode 8 of Totally On Track spotlights a classic 80s love song that is the epitome of what a true love song should be.

Smooth, understated, and beautifully delivered, it doesn’t try to be clever or complicated. It simply says what so many of us want to hear, and maybe more importantly, what so many of us hope to feel. To feel chosen, adored and that special someone to someone. To know you’ve found something real.

This one isn’t tied to a specific place or moment in time. It’s more about the feeling it creates. Warm, reassuring, and quietly confident in its message.

Sometimes the songs that strike a chord don’t take you back somewhere specific. Sometimes they simply remind you what matters most - namely to love and be loved.

Thanks for listening.

In Episode 7 of Totally On Track, I’m talking about a song that feels more like a moment than a memory.

A quiet, understated track from the early 70s that doesn’t demand your attention, but somehow holds it anyway. The kind of song that finds you at exactly the right time and stays with you long after it ends.

No big production. No drama. Just something calm, reflective, and quietly powerful.

Sometimes the songs that strike a chord don’t shout. They settle.

Have you got a song like that?

In this episode of Totally On Track, I share a haunting spoken word song from a London-born female artist…It’s a song I first heard on California radio. Out in 1987, it’s become a "modern rock classic".

It perfectly captures something we all recognise now as ghosting. Except this was long before the term had even been coined.

It’s a slow, melancholy tale of girl meets boy at a party. She describes the connection, excitement, confusion, and the creeping realisation that what she thought was real…wasn’t.

Some songs fade. Others stay with you word-for-word, years later. This is one of those for me. I can’t think of too many songs that I could actually recite, verbatim, but this is one…

Have you ever had a track that felt beautiful and heartbreaking in equal measure? One that stayed with you long after it ended? Possibly even decades later? Leave me a comment and let me know.

In this episode of Totally On Track, I revisit a dreamy alternative track from 1993 that seemed to appear everywhere in the early 90s.

It’s one of those songs that doesn’t belong to a single memory, but somehow carries the atmosphere of an entire chapter of life. For me, it brings back a small one bedroom flat in Glasgow’s West End, a job at a local radio station, the early days of living in Scotland, and the complicated mix of grief, change and uncertainty that came with that time.

We talk about the album it came from, the quiet power of slow atmospheric music, and how songs sometimes end up meaning something completely different to listeners than what the songwriter intended.

More than thirty years later, the track is still finding new audiences and has now crossed the billion-stream mark, proving that some songs simply refuse to fade.

Hit play and travel back to ‘93 with me.

In this episode of Totally On Track, we head back to around 1980.

A teenage bus ride to Tower Records in Campbell. One of the first albums bought with my own money. Classic rock energy. A Top 100 hit song from 1979 that never made it big on the charts, but made a permanent mark on me.

This is a story about growing up, feeling average, finding a theme song in unexpected places, and slowly realising you’ve been totally independent your entire life without quite noticing.

From California bus rides to Glasgow charity shop vinyl finds, and a possible trip south to see the Red Rocker again after forty five years, this one is about music that shapes identity.

Have you ever had a song that quietly helped you become who you are?

In Episode 3 of Totally On Track, we head back to the summer of 1990, to a warm bedroom in California with the hum of Highway 280 drifting through the window. This time it’s a track from the second album by a Dublin band, not one of the big singles, but a deeper cut that opens with shimmering guitars and a sax line you feel more than hear.

It’s a song about place, about belonging, and about the strange feeling of being settled and restless at the same time.

When I hear it now, I’m transported straight back to that room, just before life shifted and I moved across the world. Have you got a song that feels like home? I’d love to hear what it is.

In Episode 2 of Totally On Track, I talk about a song released in the seventies that quietly grew into something much bigger for me over time.

It wasn’t an instant obsession, but it became a personal anthem in ways I couldn’t have predicted.

Years later, it followed me across the world, into radio studios, and into a version of myself that felt like home.

This episode is about how songs don’t always arrive fully formed in our lives.

Sometimes they wait. Sometimes they grow with us. And sometimes they end up feeling like a theme song you never consciously chose.

What’s the song that became your theme?

Totally On Track Episode 1

Have you ever heard a song for the first time and known, instantly, that it would stay with you forever?

In this first episode of Totally On Track, I go back to a Sunday night in December 1984, listening to the radio in my teenage bedroom as an import single from one of my favourite high school bands made its UK debut.

What followed wasn’t just a lifelong love of a song, but a connection to the person who introduced it to me, and a lesson about memory, music, and what I later learned to call “milestone moments”.

This episode isn’t about facts or charts. It’s about how a few notes can transport you straight back to a person, a place, or a time, and why some songs never let go.

What’s your milestone song?