record of the month #2: every dawn's a mountain

24/03/25

Blue Bucket Of Gold is a free weekly newsletter from me, the musician Catrin Vincent. If you pay, I also offer long-form content, like interviews with your favourite artists, new music and songwriting prompts. This newsletter is a passion project; a deep-dive into the human psyche from someone whose life was transformed by discovering how art can heal. It started as a way to digest my favourite music, then turned into a vehicle for change, a beautiful way to understand myself and the world through writing. Please feel free to share and support in any way you can. Thank you for reading.

Hello dear reader.

I think Tamino’s album will be my album of the year. It’s hard to put into words how satisfying everything is on this record harmonically, how hard the depth and beauty of his voice and real, live acoustic instruments hit the chest, how the influence of his paternal grandfather’s singing and his Egyptian heritage bleeds through, how Radiohead’s bassist's influence can so easily be detected in ‘Raven’.

bright lie falls in
my heroine
I regret nothing

And his album has timely soundtracked my exit from London. I’ve been slowly trickling out like light through leaves, but last week, I made the final decision, and have surprisingly felt…good. What comes next? I don’t know. Where am I going? I don’t know.

Substack feels a bit like tumblr, doesn’t it? Tumblr was something I used a lot as a teen - the perfect space for adolescents to vent frustrations about capitalism, growing older, feeling abandoned and disillusioned about our places in the world - a place to share awe at the world, too, with grainy film pictures, sharing short passages from Carl Jung, light through prisms in window panes, or ghost-in-the-shell screenshots, and a place to pretend we could be who we really wanted to be, a place to curate our lives in the ways we wished they really were - writing poetry about each other, journal entries savouring good days with ephemeral friends, a way to notice and the remember little details, the universal in the particular, like finding an iridescent leaf, the way a stranger smiled….I’ll always remember a man rolling white, clean paint over beautiful, kaleidoscope murals, and how that felt, not how it looked.

Tumblr was also a place to act out on, vent on, post nudes on…I never did this! Well, everyone else did, and maybe I should have joined in with the mass-rebellion. And what is rebellion, really, but a way to assert ones freedom? A middle finger to how we eventually must succumb to the world, fit in and find our place? And like tumblr, like music, like all creative expression, writing this substack was a way to justify myself when I felt I didn’t have a voice, or space to share and explain how I felt.

Well, my major breakthrough of this year is that I don’t need to justify myself at all.

olympus mju, old film

And no, that’s not in a ‘I never have to take accountability’ way, either. I will be the first person to raise my hand and say I am flawed, and that is a deep, inescapable part of being human. To heal is to learn to walk with our shadows. But something my therapist has been trying to help me to do for years is to stop justifying my emotions, stop over-explaining my decisions and stop, stop, stop putting everyone else before myself. Feelings are simply feelings, and we don’t have to intellectualise them or justify them, nor decide if we are wrong or right to feel a certain way. Feelings are like a big sea - they just are. And they change constantly.

That doesn’t mean we can use our feelings to justify bad behaviour, or use them to hurt people. More that they just exist, this big sea, dull some days, racing and swallowing on others, and we can’t police each other over how we all should feel. I’m absolutely fascinated, now, by how we judge others - ourselves, mostly - and think in black and white, project our own feelings of shortcomings onto our nearest and dearest when fear from difficult times arises, split on people, paint people as ‘all good’ or ‘all bad’.

Tamino has called his new album a ‘metaphysical altar for what had been lost’, and last year I discovered a song off his previous album, ‘Sahar’, (which cleverly translates into ‘just before dawn’), one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard. ‘Fascination’. I often find the best artists simply allow us to feel our own feelings, and Tamino seems to never-endingly capture the beauty of living, like the world’s tumblr journals in song.

‘but none of your colours
can be found within the lines
of the pages I made mine
and the more we drift apart
the more they start to blur

I try not to understand
just try not to understand

I've seen enough
to know where I belong
and there you prove me wrong
for when I recall
all the nights that we have lost
waking in your love
I cry
I cry’

‘Limerence’ is an involuntary and intense psychological state of infatuation. To me, ‘Fascination’ perfectly captured the feeling of desperately trying ignore this infatuation, for it to dawn the second you’ve lost them. He said the song is about ‘viewing the world through someone else’s eyes’, which is what all forms of fascination and infatuation are; desperately wanting to see differently, but trying, instead, ‘to not understand’, to futilely attempt to stay the same, as if life isn’t a river, ever-moving, as if we can cling onto life how it was, to not face the feelings, to then realise all the nights of a different future lost…

every song of Tamino’s burns with things that never were.

Limerence is a powerful and often bewildering experience. It can feel like an all-consuming love, but it’s not rooted in reality. It’s more of a mirror than a true connection, reflecting back the parts of ourselves we’ve neglected or longed for. In the midst of it, it’s easy to believe that this feeling is the deepest kind of love, but with distance and reflection, it becomes clear that it’s not about the other person at all. It’s about falling back in love with ourselves, projecting our own desires and unmet needs onto someone who just happened to be there. Therapy or introspection can help untangle the illusion, revealing how it was never really about them—it was about rediscovering and reclaiming our own sense of worth.

“If I love you, what business is it of yours?”, I remember reading once. This year, I read Dr Lilly Jay’s personal statement on her husband leaving her for Ariana Grande after she had his child. It was classy, sophisticated, not finger-pointing at all, and the sentence that truly struck me was, “some of what you loved most about your partner is actually your own goodness reflected back to you; it's yours to keep and carry forward”. The way we love usually says more about us than it ever does about the people we love, and experiences like these only teach us about ourselves. I have discovered so much about myself through various experiences of love, the parts of myself I needed to nurture…the parts of myself I needed back.

We meet people and we love them, very deeply, in many ways, and it’s partly projection, partly real, and sometimes we don’t know what the energy means, and mostly, nothing has to be done about it. And I want to yell to the world that it is okay to bob along in the sea and allow yourself to exist as a human, it is okay to feel what society deems as ‘immoral’ things, like feelings for people you shouldn’t have feelings for, or frustration, or anger, or messy grief, and messy loss, and sometimes we love more than one person, and we love people in a million different ways, and we are forced to make singular choices, and let the death of the paths not followed happen. What matters is deciphering what these feelings are really telling us, or even not deciphering them at all; instead, letting them wash over us as an inevitable consequence of living.

We exist. We walk. And so we have shadows.

NPR

olympus mju, old film

Sometimes, life challenges us to confront the possibility that we might not be as terrible as our minds try to convince us. What if life actually goes well? What if things work out? What if the world is beautiful, and we’re given another chance to live fully? What if we matter more than we think?

Have we ever really considered these possibilities? That we might be resilient, strong, brave, kind, deserving of love—and fundamentally good. Not perfect, not flawless, but good in a real, human way. Good as in trying our best for those around us, loving deeply and openly, valuing truth, and being unflinchingly honest. Good as in facing our shadows head-on, acknowledging our flaws, and doing the hard work of healing. Good as in having weathered storms and returned, changed but still standing. Good as in taking on each new adventure with an open heart, making amends where we can, and recognising the pain of others.

And maybe, just maybe, it’s about time we recognised our own pain, too.

I speak about ego death a lot, and it happens again and again, I think, in us humans, like little forest fires. With Tamino’s new album, ‘Every Dawn’s A Mountain’, he spoke to NPR about ‘leaving behind so many things - a place, a relationship, a younger self, maybe even a belief system’. After his parents split up, his Dad left behind an Arabic oud with a broken neck, and he told himself he’d buy one one day, and learn it. The sound of it serves as the centre of this album, a fragmented album of fleeting, seemingly disconnected thoughts and feelings that weave together to paint a picture of love and loss.

NPR

olympus mju, old film

There’s a freedom in embracing messiness, being human without constantly striving to “heal” as if it’s a never-ending job. Healing shouldn’t feel like a duty or a constant quest for self-improvement, as if we’re the problem that always needs fixing. Sometimes, especially for those who struggle with obsessive thoughts, there’s this tendency to take on too much responsibility. If we believe that if it’s our fault, that we’re still somehow in control. But living, reacting, and feeling deeply aren’t faults—they’re just part of being human.

It’s easy to internalise the idea that we’re the problem when, in reality, we might just be feeling honestly and openly, and expressing truths that aren’t always comfortable or socially acceptable. That kind of raw, unfiltered presence can be confronting to those who haven’t faced themselves as deeply or who aren’t ready to feel with the same intensity. It’s not about being “too much” or “too sensitive” - it’s about allowing ourselves to exist fully, without apology.

And yet, we never fully arrive at ‘healing’. The journey continues out into an endless sky. And sometimes, analysing our lives becomes in itself compulsive, and counter-intuitive to living in the moment. ‘Healing’ sometimes means not living at all, or always imagining yourself as a problem to fix, instead of as a very alive human being reacting very appropriately and messily and emotionally to a terrifying world.

And when you stop striving to never cause harm, an impossible task, you actually get to live.

I am so excited to live. I am so excited for the next adventure, beyond parks crying at night because outside felt safer than any inside, beyond constantly trying to please everyone but myself. Oh - shit will come my way, of course it will. Women who fully embrace their humanness are easily painted the villain, because we’re not supposed to be human - we’re hardwired to serve. And look at our beautiful mass-rebellion, how we are finally saying ‘no’.

I love the way Tamino writes, so boldly;

I can spend the night besidе her
tracing your heat
makes me coffee in the morning
but she doesn't feel like home

Someone’s going to now know they were the woman making him coffee as he wished she was someone else. But is he worrying about hurting someone’s feelings? No, and that’s what good songwriters and artists do; live, very messily, then write about it. Good artists act as mirrors to reflect the hidden things the mass majority of the world wish they could say out-loud, and that’s why artists are both so revered and villainised.

Everybody is fallible, and that’s why OCD is so dysfunctional. We are trying to prevent the inevitable. We think if nothing bad ever happens, that means we’ve lived right. Really, it means we never live at all.

My biggest fear is clearly judgement, and I have never been judged so harshly as I was last year. Yet…was it what I wanted to do? Was it best for me? Am I happier now? The answer to all three of those questions is ‘yes’. And the sad truth is that I had to disappoint everyone in my life to get that answer, as if my life was theirs to be disappointed about.

Why do we expect so much from each other? Project, idealise, devalue? The public find out that you, a musician singing about your life, are just as fallible as the person listening? Shock! As a collective, as an ‘us’, we are always looking for the next scapegoat to define ourselves by who we dislike, out of fear and instead of our real strengths, and how we wildly cycle around people until we spin out, blow out, and bow out. And hopefully, if we’re clever, we turn inwards, realise what we dislike about them is what we really dislike about ourselves, make peace with our shadows, and can finally love each other totally, fully and very humanly.

“I regret nothing”, Tamino sings, closing the albums opening.

olympus mju, old film

I'm trying to remember
the colour of the sky back home

Being a human being is really, really hard. Mistakes and conflict are completely inevitable and ongoing, and as long as you learn from them, strive to make amends, and try your best - you’re doing better than most. We live in a system that relies on us to view ourselves as failures, that uses punishment as discipline, that relies on us to be subordinate instead of inquisitive, judgemental instead of open. Loving yourself deeply despite your flaws allows you to love others despite theirs, too, and is a genuine act of resistance in an unfair world.

Everything felt very small for many years. One day, I found an opening, and crawled out of a cave, and suddenly, now, life is very big.

C x