It's no secret that the late Dan Fogelberg was my favorite singer/songwriter.
When he passed away in 2007 after battling prostate cancer, I felt as if I'd lost a friend. I never thought I'd hear any new music from him.
But I was wrong.
Before he died, Fogelberg and his wife, Jean, agreed that she would see to it that his album "Love in Time" would be released.
The CD hit stores on Sept. 22, and visual artist Jean Fogelberg spoke to the Deseret News from her home in Maine about her husband and the new album.
While working on the live CD at the couple's ranch in Colorado, Dan came across some studio recordings and decided to put them all together.
Dan was diagnosed with cancer in 2004. The couple had already decided to build a house in Maine, and they agreed he would get treatment in Boston.
"We could finish the house," she said. "It would be a good project for us, good therapy. And he could sail here."
They went back to Colorado from time to time to sell the ranch and finish the album.
They decided that Jean would handle the packaging. They had worked together on the three previous albums, but this was the first one Jean had to do alone.
When she started working on the art after Dan died, she realized they had never discussed the packaging.
"I had no idea (what to do)," Jean said. "All we ever discussed was the music and the fact that, once he was gone, I would release it. And to tell you the truth, we had so many other things going on that I didn't really think about it that much. Not until after he was gone."
She went through a bunch of photos by photographer Henry Diltz and chose one of Dan smiling.
"The image so many people have of him is the somber singer/songwriter, but he was he one of the funniest people I knew. And he loved to laugh," she said.
The photo also shows Dan pulling the guitar away from his shirt.
"There's still an indentation of the guitar there," Jean said. "I love that because the guitar was such a part of him."
Jean superimposed that image onto a photo Dan had taken of a cove in Blue Hill, Maine. Then she pasted in a photo of a doll that appears in a cemetery on the cover of Dan's 1981 two-CD masterpiece "The Innocent Age."
She said she felt "that a part of our innocence, our youth was gone when he died."
That photo of the doll was taken at a Blue Hill cemetery. "So it all kind of ties in," she said.
While Jean pondered what to do for the cover, she listened to the music to make sure the images she chose would complement the music. She didn't know the final track, "Birds," was dedicated to her until she read Dan's notes.
The chorus goes like this: "When you see me fly away without you/shadow on the things you know/feathers fall around you/and show you the way to go/It's over ..."
And the last fade chord sounds exactly like the intro chord to the opening track "To the Morning" on Dan's 1973 album "Home Free."
"I don't think he actually ever played ('Birds') for me," she said. "So, of course, that set me back a couple of days. The combination of listening to the music and going through the photos was very difficult. But it was also kind of cathartic because it was something I wouldn't normally have been doing."
Getting the CD ready for release was important for Jean because of Dan's fans.
"His fans are so devoted," she said. "When he died, all the condolences that came in — it would be hard not to know how much his music still means to people."
I am one of those fans and can attest that "Love in Time" is a great Dan Fogelberg CD.
e-mail: scott@desnews.com