New release from Eva Cassidy - I Can Only be Me

So excited to share that a new, reworking of Eva Cassidy music will be available soon!

If you are not familiar with Eva's incredible musical journey you are about to be amazed!

It's a bittersweet story - This Maryland native was a fixture in the Washington D.C. folk and jazz club scenes for several years back in the late 1980s & into the mid 1990s, but her life was cut short suddenly when she passed away from melanoma in 1996 - Never fully getting the recognition her talent so richly deserved. In most cases, that would be the end of the story.

But Eva's musical career had a second act that not one could have predicted - In a random act back in 2001, a disc jockey on England's BBC Radio 2 played Cassidy's rendition of "Over the Rainbow" and the phones lit up! That tune introduced her voice to British audiences and ignited a media storm on both sides of the Atlantic.

In 1998, a compilation of tracks from Cassidy's three previously released recordings was assembled into the CD Songbird. This CD lingered in relative obscurity for two years until being given airplay by Terry Wogan on his wide-reaching BBC Radio 2 show Wake Up to Wogan, following recommendation by his producer Paul Walters. The album sold more than 100,000 copies in the following months!

Before Christmas of 2000, BBC's Top of the Pops 2 aired a video of Cassidy performing "Over the Rainbow", which resulted in Songbird climbing steadily up the UK charts over the next few weeks. Just as ITV's Tonight with Trevor McDonald aired a feature on Cassidy, the album topped the chart. Shot at Blues Alley by a friend with a camcorder the same night the album was recorded, the video became the most requested video ever shown on Top Of The Pops 2

In May 2001, ABC's Nightline in the US broadcast a well-received short documentary about Cassidy, a labor of love from Nightline correspondent Dave Marash who was a fan of her music. Over that next weekend, all five of Cassidy's albums occupied Amazon.com's best sellers list top spots. The Nightline episode has since been rebroadcast three times due to popular demand and producer Leroy Sievers has said that it is "probably the most popular Nightline (segment) ever". In December, a nine-minute story about Eva on NPR resulted in a similar sales surge, with five of the top seven chart spots going to Cassidy.

Since Songbird, several other CDs with original material have been released: Time After Time (2000), Imagine (2002) and American Tune (2003). In 2008, another new album, Somewhere, was released. Unlike previous albums, which consisted solely of cover songs, this release contains two original songs co-written by Cassidy. An acoustic album, Simply Eva, was released in January 2011. Her cover of Time After Time was featured on the 2003 soundtrack CD of the popular superhero television series Smallville.

Together with word of mouth and internet fan sites, online commerce has played a big role in Cassidy's success. This point was further affirmed when in 2005, Amazon.com released a list of its top 25 best-selling musicians, which placed Cassidy in fifth position, behind the Beatles, U2, Norah Jones and Diana Krall.

This project combines cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) with a 400-year-old musical tradition of symphony orchestra with a beautiful singer. Even though Eva never got to perform with an orchestra during her short life, listeners now 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 that were previously recorded, and pair them with brand new orchestral arrangements by Christopher Willis and William Ross. The nine songs found on this album are her incredible versions of the familiar tunes "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 on Blix Street Records is March 3rd, with a release of a physical CD to follow on April 7th.

Need further proof of this incredible talent? Here are a few examples - Now that you know the story, pass it along to others & help to spread the word - Eva's memory deserves that... She truley did possess the voice of an angel!