My father died on May 28, 1997, the day before my mother’s 75th birthday. It was heartbreakingly unexpected. A month or so after he died I made a decision to make him the focus of my work for one year. At the end of the year I had created a musical memoir entitled Season of the Heart that explored the spring of 1997. A year to the day after he died I performed the 40 new songs for the first time in my mother’s living room in front of a lifetime of friends. The next week I performed the memoir four different days in Seattle at the Richard Hugo House. When it was over I knew it was time to move on. It was what my father would have wanted.