#catherine's wheel

[dd-is-my-guiltypleasure]

David Duchovny Doesn't Believe in Peaking Early

David Duchovny Doesn't Believe in Peaking Early

Celebrating his New Album “Prince of Pieces”

So instead of imagining a walk, he imagined a catch. Two gloves, a ball, somewhere to stand. It's a small, ordinary image, and it landed as one of the most quietly moving answers we've gotten on this show.

[randomfoggytiger]

DD, Miller, and Music

July 14, 2026: "If looked at the lyrics on the page.... Like maybe the song 'Born to Last'-- which is, which is really for my son at, a few years ago-- if I looked at it on the page, I'd think that it was a nice, it was a nice sentiment to express to my son. But if I hear it, there's an emotionality that comes into play that can only happen with the interplay between music and, and lyrics. And I think when a song works, that's what's happening. Y'know, that the lyrics are holding the music and the music's holding the lyrics up, and there's some kind of alchemy that's going on between the two that's just working. And that, that goes back to arranging and producing and finding the right tempo and finding the right instrumentation, and all that stuff."

What can you tell us about the genesis of 'Catherine's Wheel?'

"Oh, that's another song for my son! Yeah, that came after I, you know, we had, like, a visit at the time. He was already of college age; and.... Y'know, he was just... as any nineteen year old, he was having questions and struggles and everything. And that was just, I didn't like to see him in, in pain, you know? And then I.... And again, it's just, like, this image in the back of my mind. I, I thought there was something called a Catherine Wheel. Y'know? I didn't look it up. And I remembered there was a band called The Catherine Wheel. And I thought, in my mind, it-- I knew it was an instrument of torture; but I also, y'know. And I started to think about, you know, wheels and regeneration and starting over and cycles. So, it was all kind of mystically in the same area. And I, I didn't even look up a Catherine Wheel when I wrote that. And then I looked it up afterwards, quite a while afterwards. And it was so weird because my image was somebody was kind of, it was almost like a crucifixion: like, you were, you were nailed to a wheel and somehow tortured. Maybe, maybe they rolled you, I don't know what they did. But, but after-- truly, it's, it's even more brutal than that. They just, it's just a wheel they would just hit people with! They would just, like, it was a big, heavy, wooden wheel that you would just brutalize people with. Y'know, so. Anyway, that's kinda off-story, but that's what a Catherine Wheel is."

BONUS

July 15, 2026: The Story Behind "Catherine's Wheel"

The most affecting part of the conversation, for me, was when Duchovny explained where "Catherine's Wheel" came from.

It's a song for his son, written after a visit where his son — college-aged, working through the ordinary turbulence of that stage of life — was struggling, and Duchovny didn't like watching him be in pain. He had this image in his head of a "Catherine Wheel," which he half-remembered as some kind of instrument of torture, and which also happens to be the name of a shoegaze band from the '90s. He started thinking about wheels, regeneration, starting over, cycles — and wrote the song entirely from that half-memory, without ever looking up what a Catherine Wheel actually was.

He looked it up afterward. It's worse than he imagined — not a crucifixion-style device, but a wheel used to brutalize people directly. He told the story almost sheepishly, like he'd stumbled into something heavier than he intended. But that's kind of the point he was making about lyrics versus poetry a few minutes earlier: a lyric doesn't have to hold up as literature on the page. It has to hold up *with the music behind it*. He talked about an earlier song for his son, "Born to Last," and how flat the words look in isolation — and how something happens to them, some kind of emotional current, the second music is underneath them.

[wozqgraveyardshift]

"Catherine's Wheel" by Blackbird Raum