Album Notes

Julie Ann Layne began playing piano at 4 and writing songs at 6. She learned guitar at 14, joined her first garage band at 15 and recorded her first vocal in a professional studio at 18. She has since released 3 full play cds of original music including the self-produced Daughter of the Dark Blue Gates Of Surrender, Pendulum, which was produced by Johannes Luley, and Creekside, produced by Robert Powell.

Julie has played solo, fronted and sung backup in several Bay Area bands over the past 20 years, including pop and alternative rock, bluegrass and a joyful foray into singing with the Bay Area's beloved techno-trance band, The Venusians. She has appeared in coffee houses, San Francisco rock clubs, benefits for AIDS, International Forgiveness Day and Anon Salon events.

She has been the headlining artist twice for the Silicon Graphics Band Showcase at the Shoreline Amphitheater and played the Joshua Tree Music Festival in 2004. Her music is strongly influenced by the singer/songwriter tradition of artists such as Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Laura Nyro. Tom Petty has also been a major influence which is evident in her more upbeat guitar songs. Her work more recently has drawn comparisons to Sarah Mclaughlin, Shawn Colvin and Lucinda Williams.

A talented love song writer, sometimes addressing friendship or family love, more often, the love between lovers, she weaves her songs around the central question of how do we love well and truly? How do we open to love and all that it brings, how to surrender and yet keep our center, how to have our romantic loving be a source and reflection of our love for others, ourselves and all of life. She tells the truth, sometimes the painful truth, of what happens to us in that journey; she inquires fearlessly into the universal experience of "falling into the black hole within every human heart" and the question that brings - "am I loved?" (The Chai Song).

While venturing often into the territory of longing, the mood of Julie's music is that the longing of the listener is soothed, received and allowed space to be. There is the sense of acceptance for all we are, and are not, of hope for the possibilities that germinate secretly in our hearts and for life to be wonderful and filled with grace.