Updated November 2, 2024
MY FAVORITE PICTURE OF EVA: I love this photo of Eva beside the Chesapeake Bay, a gorgeous 1994 snapshot from Eva’s German friend Wiebke Sander. Wiebke tells me that “Eva is holding stones, seashells and smooth glass pieces from sand in her hand.” One of Eva’s fans, Anne, commented, “I love this photo. It’s very symbolic to me. It has Eva showing us her treasures!!! Her love and goodness burst from that picture.”
KELLY CLARKSON: On her 9/30/2024 show the television star and former “American Idol” performed Eva Cassidy’s arrangement of “Blues in the Night.” She announced the song as “Eva Cassidy’s ‘Blues in the Night'” (never mind that it was written by Harold Atlen and Johnny Mercer), and the official YouTube clip from the show also identified the arrangement as Eva’s. She did a great job! Kelly Clarkson is an Eva Ambassador extraordinaire who has often cited Eva as a favorite.
While we wait for the physical CD of the album WALKIN’ AFTER MIDNIGHT, coming in November, Blix Street Records is continuing to share special jewels with us online! The latest is “Desperado,” the album’s finale. Yes, Eva did love Linda Ronstadt, with whom the song is most associated and from whose album Eva learned it.
This recording was from a live solo gig Eva did at the restaurant Pearl’s in Annapolis, Maryland. Eva’s friend Bryan McCulley made a video recording of part of Eva’s set. Unfortunately the lighting was not good, and even more unfortunately a friend of the owner had asked Eva if he could sit in on a few songs — and Eva was too polite to say no. As a result there were several songs for which we have NO OTHER RECORDINGS BY EVA, that were completely ruined by a rogue clarinet player. Or possibly soprano sax, I was never sure.
Fast-forward 30 years to the invention of AI, the technology that made possible the recent album that paired Eva with the London Symphony Orchestra. SHAZAM! The interloper woodwind player has been erased, to the joy of all! Or, as Bill Straw more discreetly puts it, “The other instruments from the night have been replaced by Lenny Williams’ 2024 Fender Rhodes electric piano/B-3 Hammond organ parts reminiscent of the era that spawned the song (though different from the acoustic piano featured on both original recordings). Who better to span the decades than Eva’s now legendary musical keyboard partner.”
Enjoy! And pray that my own favorite from that night, “Last Night I had the Strangest Dream,” gets something of the same treatment. Peacenik that I am, I have been agitating for that for decades.
REVIEWS ARE NOW CROPPING UP: This one from Michael Ullman in Boston’s The Arts Fuse is nice. “It’s the variety of sounds in her repertoire, reinforced by her ability to use them with the utmost tact and control, that impresses this listener. She never loses track of the story, whether singing a lullaby or claiming to have ‘that fever.’ I think she’s a wonder.”
IT’S THAT TIME OF YEAR: For pumpkin spice and autumn playlists. This year the Today Show is recognizing Eva’s recording of “Autumn Leaves” (scroll halfway down). Pretty much everyone under the sun has covered the old standard “Autumn Leaves,” but Eva Cassidy’s version stands out as one of the most memorable. Cassidy’s sorrowful vocals perfectly capture that sad feeling that almost always accompanies fall’s arrival.
Here’s an album preview on YouTube! The title song “Walkin’ After Midnight,” vocals by Eva Cassidy, lead guitar from Keith Grimes, bass from Chris Biondo, with special guest Bruno Nasta on violin. If you have the album SOMEWHERE, you have a different performance and arrangement of the classic country song (once recorded, but not written, by the immortal Patsy Cline). Update: “Blue Skies” and my own favorite “Down Home Blues” is now on YouTube also.
WALKIN’ AFTER MIDNIGHT: Coming September 6th (or in November as a CD), a new album of 12 previously-unreleased tracks recorded at the Maryland Inn’s “King of France Tavern” in 1995! Other performances of most of these songs also appear on previous albums, but these have a different “Western Swing” sound. Eva is joined by her regular lead guitarist and bassist, Keith Grimes and Chris Biondo, and guest fiddler Bruno Nasta. No drums; the venue is tiny, and as drummer Raice McLeod explains, “That quiet little room did not like booking drummers, so I was not required.”
I am very excited that one of my favorite Eva Cassidy Band songs, “Down Home Blues” (by George Jackson) is on this new album! It was on the setlist for the first-ever Eva Cassidy Band gig at Fatty’s in 1991, and they played it often for the rest of the band’s history.
If the name “Maryland Inn” is sounding familiar to you, it’s because the title song on the TIME AFTER TIME album was recorded there. From Chris Biondo, in my article about that album: “[Eva] was playing at the Maryland Inn and had asked me to bring my DAT [Digital Audio Tape] machine. We hooked it up to the mixing board. I think it was in the winter of 1995. We had a violin player sitting in with the band who had never played with us before and he didn’t know all the music we usually did. So Eva did some solo stuff that night, including ‘Time After Time,’ as well as singing with the band.” That violin player was Bruno Nasta, still a busy jazz and rock violinist in the Washington DC music scene, and I spoke with him recently for an article I am working on about WALKIN’ AFTER MIDNIGHT (be patient!).
More details to come soon.
Rest in Peace, Tony Bramwell 1946-2024. I hope to be able to link to a detailed obituary soon. Here’s a short one from The Sun.
As a member of the Beatles’ entourage Tony Bramwell was an important part of the British music scene in decades past, but it was his later career as a record “plugger” that made him a key player in the Eva Cassidy story as well. Would her posthumous fame have reached the same level without Tony’s efforts and matchless access? No, honestly, I don’t think so.
It was Tony Bramwell who got the SONGBIRD album into the hands of Paul Walters, the producer of Terry Wogan’s popular morning show on Radio 2, and it was Tony who got the “Over the Rainbow” video onto Top of the Pops 2. This is what I wrote a few years ago for the Videos page:
Hot Records in England had recruited legendary record “plugger” Tony Bramwell to promote Eva’s music in the UK. Bramwell was hard to ignore, due to his large physical presence and his prestige as a former road manager for the Beatles. He relentlessly pestered Mark Hagen, the producer of the popular program “Top of the Pops 2,” about showing the video of Eva singing “Over the Rainbow.” Hagen had his doubts about the video clip’s poor production values, but eventually (was he tired of the nagging from Tony Bramwell?) he took the risk, saying later, “We put it at the very end of the show, so that it wouldn’t be a complete disaster if all the viewers left.” On December 13, 2000, Bryan [McCulley]’s low-tech video of “Over the Rainbow” from Blues Alley was broadcast on “Top of the Pops 2.” The favorable viewer reaction was astonishing: TOTP2 later characterized Eva’s “Over the Rainbow” as “the most requested video in the history of the program” when it showed the clip again on January 24, 2001. Hagen commented, “We had never before received so many requests for a repeat… it was totally different from all those millions of expensive videos that you see on MTV: a little girl with a guitar who sits on a stool for four and a half minute and sings a song. In fact she does not just sing, she thinks the number, she feels it. That’s why she is such a talent.”
The British recording industry honored Tony Bramwell with the award “Record Plugger of the Year” in 2001, fueled surely by his success promoting Eva’s music. He later wrote a book of memoirs called “Magical Mystery Tours: My Life With the Beatles” which I highly recommend. When Tony toured the United States to promote the book, he and I discussed getting together, but sadly, he didn’t end up coming to Washington, so I never got to meet the legendary Tony in person.
Paul McCartney wrote on the Beatles website, “Sad to hear of the passing of Tony Bramwell. He was a good companion to us through the Beatles journey. Always up for a laugh and I’m sorry to see him leave. Thanks Tony. Love ya! From Paul”
HAPPY 100th BIRTHDAY to Mauro Anthony Biondo, who reached this remarkable milestone earlier this week and celebrated with family and friends. His daughter Susan writes, “He loves a good meal, a fine wine, a chocolate dessert, and a corny pun, and he is loved by all who know him.” A retired civil servant, Mauro Biondo keeps up with current events by perusing the Washington Post every day as part of his wide-ranging reading habit. “He enjoys the worlds revealed by any good read — fiction and nonfiction, serious and funny — but he is a big fan of detective stories.”
The Eva Cassidy connection, of course, is that Mauro is the father of Eva’s friend Chris Biondo, her producer and bassist. Chris says his father “has always been a huge champion of Eva.” (May 30, 2024)
ADDITION TO THE LIST OF CELEBRITY EVA FANS: Actor Jane Lynch (best known for “Glee”) recently posted on the social media site Threads, “I discovered her glorious voice after she passed. Her talent was otherworldly. Gratefully we still have it in this world. Her rendition of Sting’s Fields of Gold will break your heart.” She added a link to the live “Over the Rainbow” video on YouTube. I have a lengthy page about other famous Eva fans here, including some that would have pleased Eva so much.
EVA IS MENTIONED IN THE CSM PODCAST: May 21, 2024: Not a biggie, but I thought this was nice. Maybe even important, in this day and age? The introduction to the Christian Science Monitor podcast today quoted an essay written in The Fulcrum about Eva singing “What a Wonderful World” in her last public performance. (No music though.)
From CSM editor Mark Sappenfield:
I’ve spoken to Monitor reader Sam Daley-Harris in this space before. He is determined to change the way we change the world. We can do advocacy better, he insists.
Recently, he shared this piece he wrote for The Fulcrum, and I had to share some of it here. He writes of Eva Cassidy, the singer who died of cancer in her 30s. Not long before her death, she took to the stage at a benefit concert to sing one song: “What a Wonderful World.”
“Imagine,” Sam writes. “Instead of focusing on pain, suffering, debt or despair, she sang ‘What a Wonderful World’ surrounded by her community of friends and supporters. What if our politics came from a similar place of grace? What if our activism sprang from such gratitude?”
His answer: “It could.” We need to learn not to give up in “discouragement and despair” but to find ways “to have breakthroughs and see [ourselves] in a new light.” That is a recipe for transformational advocacy, he says. To me, it sounds simply like transformation, which is perhaps the same thing.
MELANOMA ARTICLE: Here is a gift link (no paywall) to a New York Times article about melanoma, the deadly form of skin cancer that ended Eva’s life. “The best way to reduce your risk is to avoid unnecessary exposure to UV light. The sun’s rays are strongest between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., so limit your time outside during those hours. Wear protective clothing and eyewear and regularly apply sunscreen of at least SPF 30.” There are much better treatments now than were available to Eva in 1996. Sunscreens and sun protective clothing are better now as well. Please use them.
3/22/2024: THIS WEEK, 23 YEARS AGO: Eva Cassidy’s posthumous SONGBIRD album was #1 on the UK Album Charts, the first of three Eva albums to achieve that distinction. (6 Eva albums were in the Top 10, and 10 were in the Top 40, with a total of 109 weeks in the Top 40, all per The Official Charts website.)
March of 2024 brings the “Silver Jubilee” (25th Anniversary) of the Eva Cassidy Web Site. What a project this has been! I wonder how many people reading this now have been with me from the beginning? Remember some of those exciting occasions? The first time Eva was top of the charts in the UK? The day her albums were #1, #2, #3, #4, and #5 on Amazon after the NPR “Morning Edition” story? Top of the Pops 2? Nightline? The excitement when new albums were released? Reviews in major newspapers and magazines in many different countries? Today Eva Cassidy is considered a “classic” and the new young singers talk about hearing her music when they were growing up.
Who remembers this guitar image (below) I used to use on the website? I still like it. I wish I knew who made it so I could say “thank you,” and maybe ask them if I could make a version that was more the shape of Eva’s “Songbird” guitar. If anyone is good at doing online image searches, and can find its source for me, and/or can make a similar but Songbird-shaped transparent gif, please contact me!
HERE’S AN EXTRACT FROM DECEMBER OF 2000, AN ESPECIALLY GOOD WEEK ON THE “WHAT’S NEW PAGE”:
December 20th: **WOW** What a day! The story about Eva was on NPR “Morning Edition” this morning. Now a whole new group of people is discovering Eva. This little website had 2400+ visitors, and Eva’s albums ended up ranked #1, #3, #5, #7, #9, and #14 on Amazon.com! (Next morning: #1,2,4,5,6 and 10! Ahead of the Beatles!)
Also, from Hot Records in the United Kingdom: SONGBIRD has gone gold. The gold record in the UK represents 100,000 sales in the United Kingdom alone. How wonderful.
December 18th, 2000 If you live in the Washington DC area and are going downtown to see the Christmas windows at the old downtown Woodies, take a look around the corner on 11th street to see a window display of Eva’s father’s metal sculptures! The name on the display is “T. Fitzhugh” — Hugh Cassidy’s artistic pseudonym.
December 14 , 2000 Eva’s video of “Over the Rainbow” was broadcast on Tops of the Pops 2 on BBC-TV on December 13 and 16th. Following the broadcast, sales of Eva’s albums skyrocketed on Amazon.co.uk (SONGBIRD is currently #2) and there was a record number of visitors to this website. Television is powerful!
FYI: Eva’s family have been receiving questions from her fans about Eva-themed merchandise such as t-shirts and coffee mugs which are sold online and often promoted on Facebook. They have asked me to let people know that the items they have seen have not been in violation of copyright, and they have no legal recourse regarding their sale. But this merchandise has in no way been authorized, approved or endorsed by Eva’s family.
As you know, Eva’s sisters offer prints of Eva’s own artwork on their website at evacassidy.com, as well as a wonderful bumper sticker and other official items.
THE NUMBERS ARE UP! Bill Straw of Blix Street records told me recently that Eva Cassidy streams on Spotify were up 8% in 2023, over the previous year’s numbers.
SPECIAL FOR EVA’S BIRTHDAY! A few years ago Elaine Stonebraker shared the story of her bike trips with Eva along the C&O Canal, illustrated with snapshots that had never been published. I am excited to tell you that SHE FOUND MORE PHOTOS, and they are beautiful. Presenting Eva and Elaine on the C&O, Part Two! If you’re one of the fans who wants to get to know Eva better, you’ll find that this gives wonderful insight into another of her many aspects.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, EVA! Friday, February 2nd, is Eva Cassidy’s birthday. She would have been turning 61. How to celebrate Eva’s birthday and honor her legacy? Regular visitors to this site can already guess what I’m going to say. They’re right! If Eva were still with us, wouldn’t you want to support her and encourage her and cheer for her and celebrate her birthday by attending one of her live performances? I urge you to honor Eva’s memory by reaching out to the talented, dedicated, hard-working musicians in your own part of the world. “You won’t see Eva Cassidy — there will never be another Eva Cassidy,” someone wrote in the Guestbook a few years ago, “but there will be somebody else.”
I once asked Eva who the best local singers were, and she found it impossible to answer. “There are so many who are really great,” she replied. This is still true. Support live local music!
Of course you should also listen to your favorite Eva songs on her birthday. And if you don’t already have the “Another Eva Cassidy Fan” bumper sticker on your car, laptop, bulletin board, or guitar case, visit the evacassidy.com web site, run by Eva’s sisters Anette and Margret, to see the wonderful Eva artwork prints you could treat yourself with, as well as the bumper stickers.
The people who have seen the work-in-progress are very pleased and excited (“I love it. What a glowing tribute to Eva. It does her proud”), and surprised at the amount of previously-unknown video footage that was uncovered. In fact, I’m told that editing the film down to a length of approximately 105 minutes has been a giant, painful challenge.
Now that the documentary is complete, the filmmakers need immediate funds to prepare the film for presentation to festivals and broadcasters/streamers in a certain format, looking and sounding its best. The project has been largely self-funded until now. Can you help get this beautiful film to its audience? I would love to see a flurry of small donations (though large ones are great too). Here’s the GoFundMe link. Note that the currency shown is the Euro, because the filmmakers are based in Ireland, so you just have to take into account the exchange rate. For example, 10 Euros is about $10.85 in US Dollars, and about 8.53 in Pounds. GoFundMe will automatically take the right amount of money in your own currency.
LOOKING THROUGH THE GUESTBOOK ARCHIVE as part of my Silver Jubilee web site refurbishment, I come across so many beautiful writings. I’ll toss in a sample here from time to time.
From Sim in Provincetown, Massachusetts (on Cape Cod) in 1999: “Thank you Laura! Your site is truly wonderful. I especially loved the interview with Chris. How exciting to know that all these other songs are out there! Someday you should make your way to P-town . . . where everyone knows Eva’s name . . . her CD’s are in the juke boxes, and her voice can be heard every day coming from various shops on Commercial Street. The way it should be everywhere! ”
From Ann in December 2007: “Each time I open [the Guestbook] up and read the lovely comments, I not only hear Eva’s angelic voice in my mind but I read words that are rich with spirit, charm and so much more. This web site has a music of its own.”
From Don Meuse in Nova Scotia: “Something was properly aligned in the cosmos that January night in 1996. The music recorded that night has an aura about it. Of what, I do not know! But the ground was covered with stardust after the performance.” Don, you’re one of the people I haven’t heard from in a while. If you’re still out there, please get in touch!
Here’s a fun memory from the Guestbook: In July, 2005, Mike in Syracuse posted, “Eva is #5 best selling artist of the past decade at Amazon.com!!!!!! NY TImes News: July 11, 2005 08:30 AM US Eastern Timezone Amazon.com Inducts 25 Musicians into Hall of Fame; July 16 10th Anniversary Event Performers Bob Dylan and Norah Jones among Bestselling All-Time Musicians Inducted into First-Ever Hall of Fame SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–July 11, 2005–Amazon.com, Inc. (Nasdaq:AMZN) today announced its all-time bestselling musicians and inducted them into the first-ever Amazon.com Hall of Fame. Amazon.com is mining its vast repository of sales information from the past decade to celebrate its 10th Anniversary.”
2023 WEBSITE SUMMARY: In 2023, according to my site statistics, nearly 50,000 unique visitors came to the site. Most found their way here from search engines, with Wikipedia and Facebook as distant 2nd and 3rd. The top ten countries of origin are: United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Netherlands, Germany, Australia, Sweden, Japan, France, Norway. From day to day, though, there is a lot of variation. On December 31st, for example, South Korea came in as #2 after the US. Radio airplay? Blog post? Social media link? I’ll never know.
The most-viewed pages in 2023 were the Welcome Page and the Albums and Songs page, followed by What’s New. The most-read individual article was the one about “Fields of Gold,” which was new last year.
The Eva Cassidy Web Site last received a major revision in 2015, which was when I stopped doing all the coding by hand. For the “silver jubilee” 25th anniversary, I hope to do some updating and refreshing, especially on the Welcome Page and the Pictures pages. But you’re never going to see the latest Internet bells and whistles here.
In 2023 I added several new themed articles to the site:
- Songbird Page: The thoroughbred racehorse named for Eva Cassidy now has her own separate page.
- Annapolis Mural Page: I have collected the information about the Eva Cassidy Mural, in Annapolis, Maryland, on its own page with additional details, photos, and a map. Many thanks to Jeff Huntington of Future History Now for information about the project’s history, and photo permission.
- Talent Show Page: Have you ever wondered how Eva Cassidy would do on a TV talent show? This article attempts to explore the question. Many thanks to Dan, Ned, Margret, Chris, and Steve for sharing their memories.
- Five Myths About Eva Cassidy: This article is inspired, naturally, by the many other “Five Myths” articles one sees all over the Internet. Why is it always five? Who knows?
- Also new, created in connection with the “Five Myths,” is my video about how to pronounce Eva’s name correctly. Scroll down this page a little and you will easily find it.
2024 brings the “Silver Jubilee” (25th Anniversary) of the Eva Cassidy Web Site. What a project this has been!
YOU WOULD THINK I’D HEARD IT ALL after so many years of writing about Eva, but even I can be surprised. A recent online search brought to my attention an Eva Cassidy recording I’d never come across. Circa 1990, Eva was earning extra cash singing backup vocals for a wide range of performers who recorded in Chris Biondo’s studio. One of these was Bobby Smith, a Maryland rock and blues musician who is still performing and teaching in the Baltimore area. Smith was recording a Billy Poore song, “How Can a Strong Love Turn Into a Wrong Love” (henceforth referred to as “Strong Love”).
“It’s a pretty standard country song,” Smith told me, singing a few bars over the phone. He brought in a pedal steel player for the recording, and decided he wanted a singer to do harmonies; Chris Biondo recommended someone named Eva Cassidy. “Eva was a lovely girl, and very talented. She had a nice presence about her. I was very impressed.”
“As an aside,” he told me, “Eva probably saved my life.” Years later Smith was doing a show at the Kennedy Center with Jennifer Nelson, and some of the performers were discussing Eva’s recent death. “That was where I heard that it had been skin cancer. I had a big mole on my wrist and had put off doing anything about it. It inspired me to get the mole checked out, and it turned out to be malignant. If I had waited, the doctor told me I might have had to have my glands removed, and who knows what else. So in a sense, she saved my life.”
If “Strong Love” ever shows up online, I’ll post a link to it here. As Bobby Smith says, it’s a standard country song, and Eva was just doing backup harmonies, but I know some of you enjoy hearing all of Eva’s singing, however minor. And we can all be delighted that Bobby Smith took Eva’s cancer to heart and went to see the doctor about his mole.
NPR STORY ABOUT EVA IS NOW AVAILABLE ONLINE AGAIN:
Elizabeth Blair’s 2000 story about Eva Cassidy on NPR’s “Morning Edition” was an essential turning point in Eva-awareness in the United States. Some of us remember how the SONGBIRD album instantly shot to #1 on the then-new Amazon sales charts! So I was chagrined to discover recently that the audio for the 8-minute story could no longer be heard on the NPR website. Taking the liberty of contacting Ms. Blair, who is still with NPR, I asked if she could help restore the audio. Halfway through writing to her, I realized it was actually the 23rd anniversary of the original broadcast of the story! She responded immediately that she would do her best, and her best was successful. “An American Singer’s Rising Legacy” is again available online for Eva’s fans to enjoy. It’s an excellent story and I recommend you take a few minutes out of your day to listen — Eva’s posthumous career has come a long way since then — and to ponder the role NPR played in the early momentum.
THE EVA CASSIDY WEB SITE GOES MULTIMEDIA! I made my first-ever YouTube video, in response to having seen so many “reaction” videos in which Eva’s name is mispronounced. In this video, Eva and people who knew her well demonstrate how to pronounce the name Eva Cassidy correctly. It’s less than a minute long. (Don’t show this video to my daughter, a video journalist with the New York Times. She would be horrified at my lack of skill, but for a first attempt I think it’s OK.)
AUTUMN PLAYLIST: The New York Times featured Eva’s “Autumn Leaves” on their “Ultimate Fall Playlist” of songs suggested by readers. It’s a gift link so there shouldn’t be a paywall.
August 2023: Here’s a nice review in Stereophile Magazine. critic Thomas Conrad writes, “Cassidy’s soprano is much more than beautiful. It reaches in and steals your soul.” He rates I CAN ONLY BE ME as “Performance *****
Sonics ****½”
EVA DISCUSSED ON WOWD RADIO: Music writer Richard Harrington was interviewed by Robbie White on WOWD-LP Takoma Park (94.3 FM) to discuss music promoter Mike Schreibman and his enormous contribution to the music scene in the Washington DC area, over his 50-year career. Of course I wouldn’t be mentioning it here if there weren’t a connection with Eva Cassidy! The last half hour of the interview is all about Eva, and about how she famously was introduced to the Washington music community when she sang at the Wammie Awards banquet. Mike Schreibman was the founder of the Washington Area Music Awards, and it was he who put Eva onto that important stage. Most of Eva’s fame came after her death, but that night was a highlight of her short career. Interviewer Robbie White also tells about the time he heard Eva perform live, that you simply will not believe — but I do. You can listen to the interview at this link.
A NEW SETTING FOR EVA’S VOICE: There is much excitement about the 2023 release of I CAN ONLY BE ME. The project combines cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) with a 400-year-old musical tradition and a beautiful singer who died in 1996. Eva Cassidy never got to perform with an orchestra during her short life, but now we can get a taste of how that would have sounded.
In a nutshell, advanced techniques allowed audio engineers to separate out only Eva’s vocals and pair them with brand new orchestral arrangements by Christopher Willis and William Ross. The nine songs on the album are Songbird, Autumn Leaves, People Get Ready, Waly Waly, Time After Time, Tall Trees in Georgia, Ain’t No Sunshine, You’ve Changed, and the title track, I Can Only Be Me. The album’s digital release is March 3, 2023, with a physical CD to follow in April. Vinyl will be another option.
The beautiful cover photo was taken in 1996 by Matthew Dols, only a few days after the Blues Alley recording was taped.
You have probably heard the London Symphony Orchestra more than any other orchestra, even if you never tune your radio to the Classical stations. How is this possible? Movies! The LSO is the world’s premier film score orchestra, best known for such blockbusters as the Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Indiana Jones films.
SELECTED MEDIA REACTIONS TO I CAN ONLY BE ME:
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From John Kelly of the Washington Post: Strings attached: A new Eva Cassidy album features an orchestra
- Robin Young of the syndicated radio show Here & Now, produced at WBUR Boston, featured I CAN ONLY BE ME on March 3. She played clips and interviewed orchestrator Christopher Willis and Bill Straw of Blix Street Records. You can listen to it here. Visits to this website went nuts after the “Here & Now” program aired! The NPR audience is very susceptible to Eva. I love how emotional Robin Young sounded, and her story about the first time she played an Eva song on her radio show.
- I definitely recommend this one from The Independent, in the UK. It is headlined, “A séance in song’: How a new album fulfils one of Eva Cassidy’s musical dreams Jim Farber talks to the late singer’s former bandmate Chris Biondo and composer Christopher Willis about using AI and fresh symphonic arrangements ‘to do the right thing by her.’” My favorite quote: ‘“Eva had a fantasy of one day having a full orchestra back her up,” says Chris Biondo, the singer’s original arranger and bandmate. “To her, that was the greatest place you could be musically.”’
- Here’s a video segment from ITV. It shows a bit of the orchestra making the recording, and Eva’s keyboardist Lenny Williams is interviewed. He says “Eva would dig it!”
- There was another great one in the Daily Mail that I haven’t been able to find online but will keep looking. See the headline? “The LSO plays second fiddle to sublime Eva.”
WEBMASTER REACTION: What do I think of it? I think it’s lovely. Compellingly lovely. In particular, it reminds me of the time I thought I was experiencing precognition. Here’s the story (personal digression alert!!!):
It was 1993. At that time I was on the staff of the National Symphony Orchestra, which has for decades given free outdoor concerts at the U.S. Capitol for enormous crowds. Eventually the local public television station, WETA, got into the act and created the yearly “A Capitol Fourth” television special. The concert became less an orchestra concert and more “Guest stars with orchestra accompaniment.” Some of the stars were fantastic; others I thought of as “the Love Boat folks,” because they seemed to me to be mediocrities and has-beens. It bothered me a LOT that the orchestra itself was marginalized. So I was grumpy, working at these television show concerts.
The concert on July 4, 1993, was one of the better ones, though: Johnny Cash, Rita Moreno, and Mary Chapin Carpenter. Everyone was great. All the stars dutifully read their scripted thank-yous from the TelePrompTer. Until Mary Chapin Carpenter. Narrator E.G. Marshall introduced her with “If the phrase ‘hometown girl makes good’ means anything to you…” because Mary Chapin Carpenter grew up in the Nation’s Capital. Chapin sang a couple of numbers with the NSO and did her bows. Then she forever won my heart by going off-script. She flung out her arms and cried out, “The National Symphony Orchestra!” The audience cheered for the orchestra as she graciously led another round of applause for them, and probably put the TV show 30 seconds off schedule. None of the guest stars EVER did that!
Behind the stage, the orchestra librarians and I were rejoicing, because they shared my dislike of the NSO’s relegation to the status of back-up band. “She probably came to these concerts when she was a kid,” someone said. Maybe I said it, maybe someone else did. And, “It’s special to have a truly local performer participating.”
That was when I had my premonition. “Pretty soon it’s going to be Eva up there,” I thought. It was more than thinking, though. It was something I had never experienced before, or since. It was knowledge. I hundred-percent KNEW this to be true, that before too many years had passed, it was going to be my cousin Eva singing with the National Symphony Orchestra on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol. People were going to be saying it was special to have a truly local performer up there. I knew it.
So, that was my one-and-only psychic experience, that turned out, as you know, to be completely wrong. Three years later, Eva had released the album that everyone thought would make her the star she deserved to be, LIVE AT BLUES ALLEY. Then she was diagnosed with a recurrence of melanoma, which had spread to her bones, and she died in November. Eva never sang on “A Capitol Fourth” with the National Symphony. I definitely was not psychic!
That’s the end of my completely extraneous rambling story. I only justify telling it because, well, it was significant to me at the time. And I can’t hear Eva sing with the London Symphony Orchestra without remembering that occasion.
THE EVA CASSIDY OF ICELAND: Check out this terrific article about Eva’s niece Eva Katrin Daníelsdóttir Cassidy, teenaged daughter of Eva Marie Cassidy’s brother Dan “The Fiddle Man.” You’ll definitely note a family resemblance!
I like what Bill Straw of Blix Street Records wrote about the track: “Back in the day there was a fine line between Jazz and Western Swing – often the same songs – with different instruments. Switch out the drums and keyboards for a fiddle, keep the electric guitar, and a Jazz standard became a Western Swing staple. The difference between Eva Cassidy's Blues Alley and Maryland Inn sessions is just that simple. Blue Skies jump, or Blue Skies swing. Something to be said for either, or both. The preference is in the ear, and mood, of the beholder.”