Catherine Wheel

About four years ago, at about 5 AM one morning, I accidentally found Catherine Wheel.



This is a band that seems to be largely forgotten..... And yet, it's the most transcendentally gorgeous music I have ever heard.

Nearly all their songs "exist" in that moment when pain turns into beauty, and for a moment, the pressure of living dissolves – and you just feel the inherent mysteriousness and gloriousness of everything, everything, even the difficult things that happened to you.

Or maybe it feels like remembering all the lives you could have lived but didn't.

You know, bittersweetness can sometimes be kind of ecstatic. This is the soundtrack for that.

I know almost nothing about this band. I've deliberately kept it that way. I don't want to know anything. But recently I learned that the name of the singer/songwriter is Rob and that he was born in 1965. That didn't reduce the mysteriousness of Catherine Wheel, because the fact is that there's already one person in my life with those exact same attributes. And that Rob, too, signifies a dimension of juicy mysteriousness and transcendence...... a place where pain turns into beauty.

A bit weird, I must say. I have a dear friend to whom I recommended this band, and she also feels like all facts about Catherine Wheel involve some weird, mystical coincidence. This is some occult stuff, man......