NUM012
Album cover

Catherine Howe

What A Beautiful Place

This recorded autobiography of Catherine Howe, age 20, briefly appeared in 1971. Too young for memoirs, most artists have barely established any sort of musical competence by the age of legal adulthood, let alone compositions matching the maturity and complexity of Howe’s. What A Beautiful Place, however, is a prodigious effort wrought from the melancholy ruminations of post-adolescence. The album’s eleven songs unfold like a classic bildungsroman, beginning in the smoke-stained industrial county of Yorkshire, transformed by the electrified creative landscape of mid-century London, and retiring to the warm pastoral bliss of the county of Dorset on England’s southern coast. Produced by noted jazz pianist Bobby Scott, the LP—oft-mistaken for a concept album—was available for only a month in the summer of 1971, disappearing after Reflection Records’ shuttering in 1971. While the CD is augmented with period-outtake “In The Hot Summer,” the LP stays true to the original sequence, replete with a replica jacket tucked inside the gatefold.

Track List

  1. Catherine Howe Prologue
  2. Catherine Howe Up North
  3. Catherine Howe On A Misty Morning
  4. Catherine Howe Nothing More Than Strangers
  5. Catherine Howe My Child
  6. Catherine Howe Interlude
  7. Catherine Howe It's Not Likely
  8. Catherine Howe Words Through A Locked Door
  9. Catherine Howe What A Beautiful Place
  10. Catherine Howe The Innocence Of A Child
  11. Catherine Howe It Comes With The Breezes
  12. Catherine Howe Epilogue
  13. Catherine Howe In The Hot Summer
  14. Catherine Howe Let's Keep It Quiet Now