The Listener Outside the Lines — How a Childhood of Sound Became a World of Its Own

Tracing how dyslexia, childhood exile from the playground, and a life learned through listening became the foundation for Tracks & Tales.

By Rafi Mercer

There are origins we speak of, and origins we live with. The ones we tell tend to be the polished versions, the simple arcs we shape for other people. But the real beginnings — the ones that determine how we see, how we sense, how we move through the world — are rarely tidy, and never linear. Mine began in a small room at a convent school, long before I knew what a life would look like, let alone a world built from listening.

I’ve always felt slightly out of step with the rhythms most people seem to understand instinctively. While others learned to navigate childhood through the invisible logic of the playground — alliances, hierarchies, coded games of belonging — I watched it all like someone observing a dance they’d never been taught. The strange part wasn’t that I couldn’t join in. It was that the movement didn’t make sense to me. It felt circular: the same dramas, the same repetitions, the same looping patterns dressed up as progress. Everything happening at once, sharp and loud and competitive, but without flow.

Listening, by contrast, flowed. It always has. Even before I understood it, listening held a shape — a direction, a sensibility, a pulse. Music made sense long before people did. Tone made sense long before language did. When you’re dyslexic as a child, you learn early on that the world of text is a walled garden; you can see it, you can sense its purpose, but its pathways are not built for you. So you find your own way in. Not through letters, but through atmospheres. Not through certainty, but through feeling.

The “book room” was where I spent much of my childhood — a small chamber off to the side, quiet, under-lit, lined with resources meant to help us “catch up.” I don’t remember catching up. I remember tuning out the page and into everything else. I remember the texture of silence, the way sound carried down the corridor, the emotional weather of the classroom before you even stepped inside. When life doesn’t make itself available through conventional channels, you start reading the world through its vibrations.

That is what listening became to me: not entertainment, not escape, but the first perceptual tool that felt natural, intuitive, mine. I still remember the records I clung to — the Beatles’ White Album, Elvis, soul classics, bits of piano that could open the room like a window. I didn’t know it then, but those records were the first places I ever felt fluent. Music asked nothing of me except attention. It didn’t require decoding. It didn’t judge how I processed it. It just let me be in the feeling.

In that gap — between the circular logic of the playground and the flowing logic of listening — something formed. A way of being. A way of understanding life as a kind of frequency, not a sequence. Other kids learned how to operate the world; I learned how to sense it.

And here’s the curious thing: when you grow up listening like that, intuition becomes your native language. Other people move through life like a rulebook; you move through it like an atmosphere. They step into rooms understanding the politics; you step in and understand the temperature. They follow the storyline; you follow the resonance. It’s a different kind of intelligence — one that doesn’t shout, but notices.

Decades later, I can see the map those early moments drew. I’ve built worlds twice before in my life — real ones, lived ones, ones with people and communities and scale. Each time, the instinct was the same: pick up the frequency, follow it, shape the world around it. But Tracks & Tales feels like the pure version, the truest version, the one that came not from strategy but from returning to that childhood way of sensing the world. It isn’t designed so much as heard.

People sometimes ask how I built it so quickly, or how it’s reached 122 countries and thousands of cities already, or how a platform like this can rise with almost no team, no noise, no traditional blueprint. The honest answer is: I didn’t build it like a business. I built it like a listener.

The data tells me when something resonates. The engagement tells me when something feels alive. The global reach tells me when the frequency I’m following is also one other people have been waiting for. I don’t force growth — I recognise it. I don’t choose direction — I tune into the one that’s already there. This isn’t the playground with its circular politics; this is the flow of sound, carrying you somewhere new if you let it.

And maybe this is the part I’ve never fully articulated until today: Tracks & Tales is not an act of invention. It’s an act of translation. A way of taking a life learned through listening and giving it form, language, structure. A way of building the world I could never find as a child — a world that moves at the speed of intuition, that values feeling over performance, that honours the quiet, the curious, the attentive.

Music still sits at the centre of it all. As I write this, Luther “Georgia Boy” Johnson’s They Call Me the Popcorn Man spins beside me — that 1975 blues swagger, all warmth and grit, an undercurrent of humour, sorrow, humanity. Johnson plays like someone who knows life isn’t straightforward but still finds the groove. It’s the kind of record that reminds you that rhythm isn’t just something you hear; it’s something you align your life to. The blues, especially Chicago blues, is built on personal truth — not the polished version, but the lived one.

And maybe that’s why today’s thoughts circle back to childhood. Because the blues and dyslexia and world-building all share something: they’re born from a refusal to move in straight lines. They emerge from the spaces outside the obvious, from the margins, from the need to create your own rhythm when the world’s default one doesn’t fit.

The playground jumped. Listening flowed.
It still does.

And Tracks & Tales is simply the place where that flow became a world — one built quietly, instinctively, globally, one page at a time.

Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters.
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