So today is the inaugural Music Monday post. You cannot really call what I have for music ‘love’. That is an underestimate. No, it is more a vital substance that flows in my veins and through every aspect of my life. It is always playing, this soundtrack to my life, and my preferences range far and wide so let’s get started...

Artist of the Week
Patty Griffin

Album of the Week
Flaming Red

Song and Lyric of the Week
Peter Pan
“Hey, Peter Pan
I'm going home now
I've done all I can
Besides I'm grown now
I'll think of you all painted with the night
You sit and watch from somewhere
As one by one the lights go out

I wrote a note to tell you how you matter
When the rain came down
All the letters scattered
And washed away
Drifted off to Never
Where you'll be safe from me now forever”

Music Memory of the Week
I found Patty eight years ago in an unlikely way. Commercial radio, a pop hit called One Big Love. Something about her voice got under my skin and I decided to take a chance – I bought the Flaming Red record.

Now this album starts out raging with electric guitar and feedback on the title track but then it takes this completely unexpected trajectory through varying styles. It was confusing at first - which one of these songs was she? I reached the end of the album and the Peter Pan track started to play. Resonance, goosebumps, and then tears, real tears as I was driving through the countryside.

I will say that although this album is a bit all over the place, I really cherish it. I was to find out much later that she was battling with her record company while recording this. They wanted to make her mainstream and squeeze as much cash out of the deal as possible. She wanted to stay true. I love her for this and because this is the album that brought her to me I am forever grateful. There is poetic irony in this story because I worked for this very record company long before she was ever signed and, ultimately, left the business because of my own disillusionment. She is now with a much more supportive company.

This artist who has moved me to tears and cracked my world open a bit and let the light pour in. There will be many more mentions of Patty over time but this is where Music Monday begins...