Celestial Echoes and Earthly Ghosts

Art Schop’s “Katharina” is a séance wrapped in stardust and strings. It opens like a slow-blooming memory, drawing you into the quiet storm of a woman’s legacy and a son’s aching reverence. Katharina Kepler, mother of the great astronomer Johannes Kepler, lived with one foot in the stars and the other in the soil, branded a witch by some and remembered as a mystic by her son. Schop takes that complicated history and distills it into something deeply personal—almost painfully so.

With a voice that feels like it’s floating just above the world, Schop leans into vulnerability, touching not only on Kepler’s family story but his own. The line “He was a soldier of fortune, left as the evening fell” doesn’t just paint Kepler’s estranged father—it flickers like a candle over the artist’s own family grief. There’s magic here, but also sorrow. Rationality meets mythology. Planets spin. People disappear.

Musically, “Katharina” is hauntingly spare but rich in texture—delicate guitars, echoing spaces, and a melody that feels almost like a forgotten lullaby. It’s not trying to be a hit. It’s trying to be heard by the part of you that still believes in something mysterious.

This is the kind of song you don’t just listen to. You sit with it, let it whisper, and maybe—if you’re lucky—you find a little of your own story in its orbit.