A tattered ticket stub from a great concert. An old photo of family and friends. We've all got mementos in our wallets, and 19-year-old singer-songwriter Lennon is no exception. She carries the original lyric sheet to "5:30 Saturday Morning," title track of her debut album, wherever she goes. Resolutely holding on to her own words, written in her own hand, may seem sentimental, self-nurturing, even sweet. And the song itself is a rich piano ballad redolent with pre-dawn, love-drunk emotion. But form a snap impression of the artist based on the tune -- and the tender act of preserving it on paper as a kind of talisman -- and you'll soon be sweeping up the shards.

A few days passed her 18th birthday -- just as Lennon was about to graduate from high school and sign her record deal-tragedy struck: She arrived home from school to find her mother dead of an apparent allergic reaction. But Lennon herself couldn't fall apart; she became solely responsible for her eight-year-old sister, Mariella, whom she and her mom had been raising since the child was an infant. "I had to take care of her," Lennon says, explaining that an aunt (not the child's birth mother) suddenly decided that she wanted Mariella, and a fierce custody battle ensued. "I couldn't rest, I went right back to school because if I broke down -- if it looked like I wasn't going on -- Mary would be taken away from me," says Lennon, who has formally filed for adoption and hopes to see the situation soon resolved. Suddenly finding herself without a mother -- and becoming a mother herself -- reinforced, rather than deterred, Lennon's musical goals: She needed her deal to support Mariella, and her own mom, of course, would have wanted Lennon to make her album.