I Can Only Be Me

Product Information

Eva Cassidy's catalogue of recordings began that day in Chris Biondo's studio where he, impressed with her talent, asked her to come back so he could record her as a soloist, eventually introducing her to Washington's "King of Go-Go" Chuck Brown with whom she would make an album. The goal with the orchestral version was to complement her pure vocal essence with a simple, yet broader instrumental arrangement – a lush musical landscape with Eva’s voice at the center. Eva Cassidy’s original vocal parts have been isolated and accompanied by new arrangements written by Oscar-shortlisted Christopher Willis and Grammy-winning William Ross.

The release of the “Songbird” track coincided with the song’s debut airing on BBC Radio2 in England. To complete this picture, in between Eva's verses, I imagined two birds, represented by two high penny whistles up above the strings. But as I went deeper into Eva’s life story and catalogue, I came to understand the extent to which she herself had experimented in the studio and had been looking for new ways to record her songs. Songbird," the first track on the new album, has been released by Blix Street Records as a digital single and is available from iTunes, Spotify and other digital outlets.

The result is an emotive, atmospheric album, familiar yet different, lush soundscapes accompanying pristine vocals. A day after the 60th anniversary of Eva Cassidy’s birth (February 3, 2023) I Can Only Be Me will be released. Nobody could have imagined that the audio and video recordings captured that night would prove to be the foundation of Eva Cassidy's posthumous superstardom.

I CAN ONLY BE ME, the album's title track, is a radical reworking of a little-known song by Eva Cassidy's musical hero, Stevie Wonder, while the album's eight other tracks receive their own special reimagining. Back in 2001, it was the BBC playing Cassidy’s rendition of “Over the Rainbow” that introduced her to British audiences and ignited a media storm on both sides of the Atlantic.Unable to secure a record deal that didn’t compromise her penchant for wide-ranging material, she cashed in a small pension to pay for the recording of her first album, LIVE AT BLUES ALLEY, in 1996. Eva Cassidy’s original vocal parts have been isolated and accompanied by new arrangements written by Christopher Willis (Schmigadoon! Engineer Dan Weinberg, who handled the audio restoration, adds: “Eva’s original vocals stem are basic live recordings with limited audio data for restoration, so we used a multi-stage process of machine learning, with delicate, almost forensic, editing of sounds—from cymbal bleed to the crockery noise of people eating dinner a few feet away from Eva (at the Blues Alley nightclub in Washington, DC where many of Cassidy’s live performances were recorded).

The goal with the orchestral version was to complement her pure vocal essence with a simple, yet broader instrumental arrangement – a lush musical landscape with Eva's voice at the center. VG/EX means that the item's sleeve is in Very Good condition and the disc is in Excellent condition. All image and audio content is used by permission of the copyright holders or their agents, and/or according to fair dealing as per the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.The latest chapter in an unparalleled posthumous career, I Can Only Be Me is a landmark new collaborative album with the London Symphony Orchestra. When she passed away in 1996 from melanoma at the age of 33, she left behind a small catalogue of recorded material that has been painstakingly curated into more than a dozen individual collections that showcase her extraordinarily versatile voice and her wide-ranging, but unerringly tasteful, sense of material.