The “day the music died” for me, as a writer, was when my husband’s beloved brother (and our lead guitar player) passed away from cancer. Grief swallowed me whole, and that grief silenced me for many years. Then my husband and I visited Gettysburg in the spring of 2011. We were not prepared for the enormity of the experience. We walked the fields, we rode them on horseback, and we climbed the rocky viewpoints in silence, overwhelmed. But more than anything, we saw for the first time in our lives what the cost of freedom looked like, and it drove us to our knees. As we stood beside a creekside where bullets had once flown, a lone bag piper played “Amazing Grace” over the hallowed soil. And something in me broke. Perhaps it was the ineffable sorrow that drenched the battlefields of this terrible war. I may never know. But somehow, being immersed in that incalculable sorrow, I began to heal from my own grief. And the stories told over us began to sing to me again, and I grabbed every scrap of paper I could find as the words and music poured in. This summer as we continued to try and capture the experience of the Civil War battlefields on this album, our next lesson came in the gift of unexpected open heart surgery for my husband Tim, who, according to all in the medical field, was lucky to still be alive. Without the skillful professionals who cared for him and healed him, there would have never been an album, so I am so grateful God had a different plan for us. Without Tim’s beautiful voice, my own would have been silenced once again . We hope you take a moment to read inside what inspired each song, and we hope we honored the stories told to us of those who sacrificed their lives in the name of Freedom. Char and Tim Seawell