THE PATHWAYS RECORDS COLLECTION

An Introduction

This collection was never just about music;

It was about the way music travels.

Radio. Vinyl. Cassette. CD. Stream.

But not just formats—delivery systems for memory, for emotion, for healing, for the truth we sometimes couldn’t say until someone else sang it first.

Each print in this series is a kind of altar. Neither pristine nor untouchable, but honest. Layered. A little weird. Very human.

And each lyric was chosen by a staff member here at Pathways.

The song it brings to mind is their small fingerprint on our common spaces, our corridors, and the rooms where we find ourselves waiting. Each tune is a gentle gift from each individual staff person of thoughtfulness and healing for the in-between times here.

Every print includes the dominant way people heard music when that song was released—because mental health, like music, lives in context. A cassette forming Elton’s shades. A CD spinning behind Lauryn like a nimbus. A phone screen holding Hozier and Staples’ protest and poetry in a single streaming frame. A vinyl record stretching into the clouds from beneath a Beatles’ barefoot toes.

There are hidden things, too, in every layer of every print. A multitude of things just like all of us hold. Morse code quietly spelling out a quote from groundbreaking psychiatrist Carl Jung, for one, extoling decades of healers well into the future to make sure music is always an essential part of any attempt at healing work.

It’s there if you look for it, waiting to be found.

Just like healing often is.

And tucked into each one, like a signature, is the logo for Pathways Records. A fictional label to be fair, but a very real commitment to help this community sing and have its music heard. Because maybe the people who come to Pathways for help aren’t just clients or patients.

Maybe they’re artists in the making.

Maybe they’re already composing their comeback symphonies.

Maybe surviving is its own kind of soundtrack,

and triumph in recovery is its best hit.

Personally, this project is my love letter to the lobby and the corridors and the waiting rooms of this old place. Ask me why one day soon. It’s a love letter to the bones that shape the body that is doing the work.

And to every anxious person waiting to be seen. To every parent seeking help for a child. To every victor celebrating another good day. To the late-night staff on rounds and to the early-morning brewers of coffee each day. To the therapists with full hearts and full caseloads. To the nurses and the doctors and the case managers. To the cleaners and the builders and the budget balancers.

To the family that this place—this work—makes of us all.

And for every moment music breaks through

where words have failed.

For every instance where a beat has sustained us until our minds could catch up to a more hopeful reality.

May these prints offer a kind of welcome.

May they invite curiosity.

May they promise our respect.

May they whisper what someone needs to hear at just the right time, planting the tune in their hearts like a healing earworm.

And may every person who walks by find a little piece of themselves—

in the lyrics,

in the story,

and in the silence between the beats.

And may all who hear us know that

help is here,

Donald Jordan, 2025