writing to think

2/06/25

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 thought back to 2023/early 2024 again, and it feels like that year happened yesterday. I have flashes of my favourite park, the one that held me when no one else could; hours spent walking, walking, walking, and lying on the grass. I have flashes of travelling for two hours to north London to my friends house to write with him, and the sun setting like a red hot blanket over an alien, urban desert, and then taking the song back to the park, in the South, and listening to it as if my life was a movie. There were always so many planes ahead, so, so many, but somehow they all were still so far apart and solitary, like tiny metal dragonflies sailing lazily along the horizon.

I have flashes back to the group of trees I felt so connected to, and the man who always came to hang upside down under one until he eventually approached me with a, ‘what are you writing?’ and then something about a word, and my electric blue notebook. My memory always blurs on any facts I learn, like what the word was - something to do with nordic etymology - but I vividly remember where the grey hairs on his beard grew, and the very specific way his teeth fit together when he smiled, like a slot machine. I’d write under those trees every day.

I remember the park ranger who came and told me to, ‘play a guitar chord, and I’ll be able to name it’, and he actually could, and the little red phone booth-turned-art-gallery, and someone asking to take a picture of me to put in it, and every time a festival cut off half the park, and plans of barbecues that never materialised, and zippos circus in the dead of winter, where I sat for hours on the same bench, on the phone to people, staring at the white lights piercing through fog.

I’ve been sending my album to people. I think it’s ready now. I’d like to gently share that it got signed.

I’d really like each album I make to be like a painting in an art gallery, its own world. I’m going to try and make the music we can’t find anymore, instead of fighting algorithms. We’ll see.

I’ve been writing poetry, rebuilding my life, thinking of saving for a van, reading a dinosaur book my guitarist got me, looking at bugs, trying to rest. Hope you’re all okay out there.