You know, there are songs and then there are songs.

The first time I heard Pearl Jam’s Future Days, I was speechless. Breathless. I cried. This song . . . the music and the lyrics . . . they utterly destroyed me.

At the time, I was writing I Choose You, the third book in the Perfect Dish Romance series, and the song influenced the very end of the story.

I almost never use the same song twice in two different books’ playlists, but when I began naming the books in the Keeping Score Trilogy, I kept coming back to Future Days. I’d already decided on When We Were Us, and it was important that the third book incorporated an ‘us’ or . . . a ‘you and me’. As I listened to the lyrics of Future Days, I knew I’d found the title of Book 3.

I believe,
And I believe ’cause I can see,
Our future days,
Days of you and me

This is so much Quinn, and Leo, and Nate. Leo could have sung this song. It is a song of love, of forgiveness, of reaching a place of acceptance and looking forward . . . it IS this book.

And so there was no doubt that this song had to be part of the play list. I’ll admit, too, that I listened to it rather a lot as I wrote Days of You and Me. 

This playlist is one of my all-time favorites. I have a feeling I’ll be playing it for a long time to come, and I’ll never hear it without thinking of Nate, Quinn and Leo.