Borne through a year of home recording sessions and whittled cautiously from the bark and bulk of a fruitful storm, we now present to you the full-length debut from Olympia, WA songwriter Eleanor Murray. For Cedar’s opening track, “Today” begins carefully, setting out the landscape that dominates the album – long introspective walks, changing seasons, the natural surroundings of the Pacific Northwest. Throughout the record, a backdrop of strings and distant vocals play commentary to the suits of arpeggios falling over the distance between forest and salt water. The heavy winds exhale at the entrance of cymbals, pulsing kick drum, and sustained violin tones that sweep you up into the thin air of the mountains. As you trek down into the wilderness of treetops bristling against an electric sky, you can hear your own breath. A movement of minor keys in the second half of the album converges with the pitch-brightness of an autumn sunrise. For Cedar’s garden grows through repeated listens as additional instruments exhume themselves from the undergrowth. It is as though the first time around some lone traveler with holey pockets had been leavening s¬eeds throughout a veiled flowerbed. The themes of nature and love - near and astray - accumulate, materializing as clouds drifting over the songs, all beneath the weather of the same sky. This album provokes in us the moments of retreat when sincerity and creativity can bloom out from under the open umbrella of music. Available on CD and digitally through anonymous monk records, October 21, 2008.