Totally On Track Podcast

In this episode of Totally On Track , I’m heading back to 1981, from the jukebox at The Garret in Campbell to my first stadium gig at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. It’s a song that starts with one of rock’s most recognisable riffs, but for me it also means root beer, pepperoni pizza, Tower Records, teenage nerves, and my dad Ralph somehow pulling four concert tickets out of thin air on the mo...

In this episode of Totally On Track , I’m talking about a late 90s track that found its way through Dawson’s Creek , turn-of-the-century listening habits, Glasgow gig memories, and one of my favourite female vocalists of all time. It is a song about longing, return, and that feeling of coming home to a person, not just a place. Some songs become huge chart hits. Others settle in somewhere more per...

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 add...

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, t...

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 fou...

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. Som...

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 describ...

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 Scot...

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 realisin...

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 s...

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 alw...

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...

Just back from California and finally shaking off the jet lag (sort of). Though it was time to share my record and CD hauls from the Golden State. Transcript of Audio (With a few ad libs mixed in) Hey, it’s Thea here – and I’m just back from spending April in California! Between the sunshine, seeing old friends, Canva Create, several road trips, and a few epic meals, I also managed to squeeze in s...

Music, Memories, and Mixtapes - by Thea Newcomb @ Totally Content UK Where did my fascination with the Emerald Isle even come from? I can’t quite pinpoint it. It could be from the framed print of a remote Irish cottage that hung on the wall of my small Californian bedroom...Calling to me like some kind of mystical beacon. Or maybe it’s the supposed 31% of Irishness that the Ancestry DNA test says...

Do you remember the first time you fell in love with a record? That moment when the needle drops, the world fades away, and for a few minutes, nothing else matters. Music has a way of freezing time, tying us to moments, people, and places—sometimes in ways we don’t even realise until they’re gone. Hi, I’m Thea Newcomb, founder of Totally Content . My love affair with records started with 7" single...

👋 Hey There, it’s Thea, here! Welcome to my little corner of the Internet. If you’re into music, retro tech, and all the pop culture goodness from the 80s, 90s, and beyond, you’re in the right place. I’ll be sharing what I’m listening to, watching, making, buying, and selling—whether it’s vinyl, cassettes, MiniDiscs, classic flicks, or binge-worthy TV. You’ll also see some of my music-themed merc...