Peter Gallagher is a Portland-based musician who shares healing folk music. He has brought his music into a variety of settings: to churches, schools, rallies, funerals, house concerts, bars, coffee shops, meditation halls, on the street, and many other places besides--and is always able to foster a unifying, healing experience for the audience.His debut full-length album, Walk With Me, builds on the strengths of Gallagher’s earlier music without losing any of its intimacy or immediacy. Across the album his strong voice and delicate fingerpicked guitar parts are complemented by sweeping strings, gentle arpeggiated piano lines, foot stomps and hand claps, propulsive drums, jangling electric guitars, and gorgeous multi-part harmonies, but the sum of all these disparate parts is cohesive and distinctly self-assured -- a natural extension of Gallagher’s musical sensibilities and a reflection of his talent as a musician and arranger. Gallagher draws on a wide variety of influences, ranging from the infectiously participatory joyful noise of call-and-response gospel to the politically conscious protest-folk of Woody Guthrie, to create songs that are profoundly spiritual, deeply personal, but always accessible and always moving. Relationships feature heavily in the album’s lyrics; relationships with people, with places, with God, with systems of power and oppression. Gallagher’s heart is planted firmly on his sleeve as he sings about friendship and loss, faith and war. In “Serenity Prayer,” an album standout, he breathes new life into one of the most widely-known affirmations of belief through the simple act of setting it to music. “Know these feelings can bring healing,” Gallagher sings on the centerpiece track “Elijah,” words that could be considered a thesis statement for the album, and his music as a whole.