Ryan & Abby with the youngest segment of their fan club… in Cape Cod, 2009.

Unless you’ve been around a long time, you may not know that we have a theme song.

It’s kind of a long story, really.

Music has always been important to us.

One summer afternoon, back in about 2006 we went into Boston for the day and stood for a long half an hour listening to these two beautiful young men play their guitars and sing their hearts out in Quincy Market. The word that best described them for me that day: joyful.

Tony downloaded their music (pirated of course) that afternoon and it became part of the sound track of our lives.

Then, one afternoon, a year or so later it hit him like a ton of bricks on the way home after a whirlwind trip to NYC… he used to do these marathon 20 hour days in which he’d drive from our house in northern NH to NYC, do meetings all day, and then drive home that night because we don’t sleep well apart…. wow.. that’s a memory I haven’t thought about in a while… another lifetime.

But, I digress… so, the music, it hit him like a ton of bricks and he called me:

“Have you heard that Ryanhood song? Gardens and Graves, have you heard it? I mean have you REALLY listened to it? It’s US. It’s perfect! It’s exactly what we’re doing!”

So I listened. Really listened.

And he was right.

It was the fall of 2007 at that point. We were getting ready to put our house on the market. It was crunch time in our preparations for our 2008 launch, quitting the big time job, getting rid of our stuff, packing up our precious and tiny children and bundling them onto the back of our bicycles and throwing ourselves into the hands of the fates. It was a scary time, and a time bright with enthusiastic optimism.

I wrote to the guys and introduced us, our big plans and our big idea and asked them how we could go about getting the rights to the song to use on our website and our podcasts. I expected it would be impossible. Or expensive. Or impossibly expensive.

Ryan wrote back quickly and blew our socks off by giving us the song, no strings attached.

So we invited them, complete and utter strangers, to our blast off party and asked if they might be willing to play the song for our friends.

They blew our socks off again by coming.

I cried as I heard them play it live, for the first time, just for us… for our friends… days before we changed our lives forever. It was one of those moments in life where the light shines down and it’s so clear that this is the moment all other moments have conspired to provide.

So… long story short, they’ve become good friends. They’ve played a few private concerts for our friends over the years. They’ve gotten “big” and played with people like Jason Mraz and we’re so excited for them. We go to every concert within driving distance. They always play our song for us. Ryan and Abby hosted all 13 of us when we came through Tucson on our Mama Bus trip, and Abby has written a few articles for us on Uncommon Childhood. We love these people, and we have a suspicion that you might too.

So, you wanna hear our song?

We can’t recommend these guys enough. Their music is fantastic, but who they are is fantastic too.

All of the albums are available as digital downloads for only $5 each. 

So, anyway, I’ve been thinking about them recently and I’ve been meaning to write a little bit about our theme song to reintroduce our friends here.

Do yourself a favour, check out their website and buy some tunes!

*** For the record… we owned up to our piracy. Ryan laughed. We’ve since purchased multiple copies of every album they’ve produced and backed a couple of their projects up front…. we continue to work to redeem ourselves!***