Tracy Grammer

Like taped-up cardboard time capsules, the boxes are reminders of an era that has passed and cannot come again, but also of a career and a loving bond both cut short. Although Grammer invokes Carter's legacy every time she steps onstage, performing his songs of mysticism and humor and stark beauty, she's put off dealing with those boxes -- too busy touring, making albums, keeping afloat, always moving.

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In the mid-1990s, Grammer co-founded a short-lived pop band called Juicy, but it wasn't until a new job took her to Portland, Oregon, that she felt she'd found her calling. In February 1996, a few weeks after her arrival there, she saw Dave Carter perform at a songwriter showcase. Carter, raised in Oklahoma and Texas, had worked as a computer programmer, but also was a spiritual seeker who had studied the mysteries of the human experience at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, California. His songs, woven with dense wordplay and almost psychedelic images, sounded like a cross-pollination of country crooners, folk icon Bob Dylan, and Hero with a Thousand Faces author Joseph Campbell. He liked to describe his style as "post-modern mythic American folk music."