The 5 a.m. Hours
By Rafi Mercer
It’s early again. The kind of early that only really belongs to world builders — the ones making something quietly before the world wakes up. There’s a flat white on the table, still a little too hot to drink, and the glow of the laptop feels like the only light in the room. These are the hours Tracks & Tales lives in — before emails, before noise, before the rest of life starts asking for attention.
Most of what you read here — the city essays, the dailies, the listening bar discoveries — they’re written in this half-light. I’ve built this whole thing between 5 and 7 a.m., or late at night when everyone else is asleep. It’s not glamorous, but it’s real. It’s when the thoughts arrive unfiltered, before the world starts shouting again.
This morning I caught myself thinking — what if this was my full-time rhythm?
What if the listening, the writing, the slow mapping of sound across the world, wasn’t the thing I do around the edges of work, but the work itself? I suppose that’s the quiet dream behind every small creative project: to build something that feels so right it starts to pull the rest of your life into orbit.
I’ve spent my days in luxury sound — systems, design, the fine details of how materials shape what we hear.
It’s taught me patience. Proportion.
Discipline.
But Tracks & Tales came from another frequency altogether. It came from that need to listen beyond the surface — to understand what sound really does to us when we give it time. And in some ways, it’s the truest version of what I’ve always been doing: finding the soul inside the signal.
The funny thing is, this project already feels full-time in its reach. There are now thousands of readers, across dozens of countries, checking in daily. A thousand pages indexed. Almost ten thousand page views a month. It’s bigger than its hours. And maybe that’s what keeps me awake — the sense that this has outgrown the early mornings.
The dream, if I’m honest, is simple.
I’d like to wake up and know that the day ahead belongs to this — to writing, to mapping, to listening, to turning the world of sound into something you can hold, read, and live through.
To build a small, self-sustaining studio for slow listening. To make it my only work, not my other one.
I’m not there yet. But each morning, each essay, each shared cup of coffee gets it closer.
That’s what the “flat white idea” is really about — it’s not a gimmick, it’s a bridge. A way to turn small support into hours, and hours into momentum.
Enough of those moments strung together, and maybe this becomes the thing it was always meant to be.
So I’ll keep going — early, quiet, steady. The way all things worth doing begin.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters.
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