Dear Friends,

A quick word to remind you that next week is the album release for Stories Out of Cherry Stems: Katie Procell sings works by Peter Dayton! Click the image or button below to go to the virtual album release event page and set yourself a reminder for the YouTube premiere at 7pm EDT. It's going to be a beautiful and engaging 50 minutes of album teaser tracks, interview excerpts with Katie and myself, Douglas Johnson's beautiful artwork, and I'll be interacting with the audience through the live chat function during the premiere (the video will be viewable indefinitely, though)!

Today is also 5 years to the day when I first heard Katie Procell! I have been doing some cleaning and organizing around my music studio and found the copy of the program that I kept from that fateful concert. Katie gave an astounding performance of Olivier Messiaens' Harawi: Chant d'amour et de mort, and the rest is history (and continues to make history together with this new album). Katie, along with Kyle Blake Jones, Erin Baker, Eric D'Alessandro, and Amanda Dame, gave a truly wonderful concert on Saturday, April 30, premiering two of the pieces on the album for a masked audience of 42 people at Clifton Mansion. It was a truly magical experience to make live music with Katie again and to share live this hard work from last summer with a wonderful gathering of friends and family. It is the privilege of a lifetime to find a collaborator and champion like Katie. I'm so grateful for her support and happy to share her musicality with the world through this album.

In addition to the release of the album, my husband Doug Johnson is releasing a book of his ink drawings of musicians that he created to document the rehearsal and recording process of this past summer. It's a beautiful collection of over 50 color images. Doug is selling these gorgeous books of $35/copy with a $5 shipping fee for purchases outside the Baltimore metro area. Click here or the image below to fill out an order form.

Stay strong, friends.

-Peter