Making Tracks Music Podcast

Singer/songwriter, poet, performer (and now podcast host!), this episode focuses on me, Thomas Kam. Beginning as a classical and jazz pianist, I first started songwriting when I began to set my poems to music. After school, I briefly studied at Oxford before leaving to become a musician. In 2017, I was diagnosed with leukaemia and spent 6 months in isolation, during which songwriting became essential to survival. These experiences made me realise the capacity of music to give meaning to our lives, and to help us through hard times. The track I’ll be playing is “Call Me When You’re Falling Down”, an ode to friendship and the healing power of music. I also discuss how I got involved with Making Tracks, and ended up making this podcast.

Eli Carvajal writes “connection songs” which he shares in intimate performances, woven with engaging storytelling. In this episode, we look at his track “Mom Song”, about his mom’s story - her transition from being a dancer to being a lawyer, her move across the Atlantic, and her recent heart attack. It was this incident that inspired Eli to write this first song on his new album “Incubabies”, an extraordinary autobiographical exploration of his family history. We also discuss Chinese poetry, our first experiences of performing, and the artist as a “prism for consciousness”.

Kathryn Williams is a fiercely independent singer/songwriter who has attracted great praise for her beguiling contemporary folk songs. She rose from relative obscurity in 2000 when her self-released album Little Black Numbers was nominated for a Mercury Prize. In this episode we listen to her track "Heart Shaped Stone", which she wrote whilst on tour, taking her son with her for the first time. We talk about how her songwriting has evolved over her career, writing collaboratively and teaching - and how both of these things change the music she writes. We also discuss the nuances of silence, the nature of fame, and the value of failure.

Poet, producer and rapper Dizraeli's work defies classification, straddling hip-hop, bassline, and folk. In this episode we discuss his track “Everybody Here’s Golden”, about the moment of breaking out of a period of darkness and the feeling of sudden liberation and love for everyone around him. The track belongs to “The Unmaster” (nominated for Worldwide Music Awards’ Album Of The Year 2020) which is based on his experience of a mental breakdown in 2017 and which he describes as a “sonic film… about how we navigate through madness and collapse”, We also discuss his time studying percussion in Senegal, the relation of music to Black Lives Matter and his practice of mindfulness.