Genre: Pop/Rock, Worship
For fans of: Dan Fogelberg, Cat Stevens, Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor, Daniel Lanois
Label: Curb/Warner

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Over these past 15 years we've heard the music of Fernando Ortega as if it were the soundtrack to our lives.

We met this extraordinary artist though his early music, which danced to guitars and drums, fueled by the energy of youth yet crafted to the highest standards of pop composition, comparable in its vision and quality to the best of Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon.

This was music rooted in a village near the banks of the Rio Grande, where his family had lived for eight generations. From here it rose from a bedrock of classical training and blossomed through studies at the University of New Mexico and varied life experiences into a sound that embraces country and classical, Celtic, Latin American, and world music, modern folk and rustic hymnody.

His songs have proclaimed love and gratitude to God poetically yet conversationally, whether in English or Spanish. He has written, played, and sung about the feeling of a lover's breath, the beauty of a dawning day, of roaming far from home, the flight of a dragonfly, and the perfect combination of candlelight and conversation, the ocean's roll and the sun's descent—the wonders of our world, each a reminder of a better world beyond time's horizon.

Yet through all of this Ortega sensed something missing, something that his music had yet to say.

"Usually I look for daily solitude so that I can think or pray," he says, quietly. "But a while ago I noticed that my ability to concentrate was changing. I couldn't make it all the way through a book anymore. My mind was moving constantly, from one thing to the next."

And so, one day last November, he took a walk.

Pocketing a pen and a notebook, he left the home he shares with his wife Margee, making his way through the canyon and up into the hills that overlook the Pacific. It was wintertime, so the beaches at Laguna were deserted and for two or three hours, by his measure, he was alone to reflect on where he had come in his life. It was in some ways a difficult time: An aunt, to whom he was especially close, had just passed away. In the next weeks and months, several other friends and relations would follow her.

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