Eva Cassidy with the London Symphony Orchestra

One of the greatest voices of a generation in a version you've never heard before!

Album now available!

"Eva had a dream to one day be supported by a full orchestra. For her, it was the most wonderful place to be musically."

Chris Biondo, original producer and member of Eva's band.

Mail on Sunday ★★★★★

It may be hard to imagine the combination of warmth and kindness of singer Eva Cassidy with the technology of the latest innovations in sound reconstruction. But it is precisely the marriage of these two seemingly different worlds that has allowed to create one of the most moving, and at times incredibly transcendental albums, which will be released this year.

"I Can Only Be Me" is a work in which one of the most esteemed voices of the last 40 years is purified and, thanks to the oldest London symphony orchestra, presented in a completely new light. The starting point were the vocals recorded by Cassidy before her death at the age of 33, which were processed by composers, instrumentalists, and technicians from Old Street to Brighton, from Nashville to Pasadena. As a result, the artist, who already stirred the emotions of millions of people worldwide, has received a completely new face.

Of the nine tracks on the new album, one (Autumn Leaves) is the work of American arranging-production team William Ross and Jochem van der Saag, while eight were arranged by British composer Christopher Willis. Willis is a former musicology doctoral student at the University of Cambridge, but he abandoned his studies in fugue and counterpoint to "escape" to Hollywood. When Tom Norrell from Eva's record label - Blix Street - heard Willis' soundtracks for Armando Iannucci's films "The Death of Stalin" (2017) and "The Personal History of David Copperfield" (2019), he felt that Willis could be the one to present Eva's music through the lens of a symphony orchestra.

The skeleton around which Willis laid his compositions consists of two studio recordings of Eva plus recordings from her concert at the Blues Alley Jazz Club in January 1996, the year of her death. Eva's original vocal tracks are simple live recordings with limited audio data for restoration," says engineer Dan Weinberg, who handled the refreshing process of the recordings. "So we applied a multi-stage machine learning process, with delicate, almost laboratory-like, sound editing - eliminating, for example, the sounds of people eating lunch several meters away from Eva. Many hours of rendering preserved the quality and character of her performance, without losing any of the magic".

The artificial intelligence and machine learning technology involved in extracting Eva's voice is similar to that used in the recent documentary film "The Beatles: Get Back" and in the reissue of the album "Revolver". However, Willis quickly discovered that this process is more organic than it seems. "The term artificial intelligence almost suggests that we put Eva into a machine, like Metal Mickey, and she just came out the other end," he says. "But there is a lot of human involvement. It's more art than science - like restoring a painting".

However extraordinary the technical achievements may be, it is not the digital technology tricks that captivate listeners of this hauntingly beautiful album. "I Can Only Be Me" creates another facet of Eva Cassidy's story, whose short life, cruel death, and above all, honesty and sensitivity touched so many. The almost tangible sense of her presence, which underpinned her unparalleled posthumous career, is now more vivid and moving than ever.
For Willis, working so closely with her legacy, Eva's spiritual strength was unavoidable.

"It seems that when she sings, she thinks about great things," he says. "And the orchestral arrangements enhance that feeling. The result is inevitably ethereal, you can feel Eva's presence transcending time and space. This effect was not intentional, it just appeared on its own".

The tracklist includes performances of "Songbird" by Christine McVie, the gospel hymn "People Get Ready" by Curtis Mayfield, Bill Withers' standard "Ain't No Sunshine", and Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time". But perhaps in the lesser-known songs (traditional "Waly, Waly" by Buffy Sainte-Marie, "Tall Trees In Georgia", and the title track, "I Can Only Be Me" by Stevie Wonder) the meeting of the London Symphony Orchestra and the girl from Bowie, Maryland, is most mesmerizing. With lush sonic landscapes and flawless vocals in perfect balance - what Willis calls "fitting into the contour of what she did" - Eva's artistry and her gift for creating numismatics reach new heights.

"You really start to feel like you know Eva," he says, "because that's her impact on people. You start to care about her - you don't want to show the world something that isn't right". This feeling is shared by the singer's family, who gave the project more than just a stamp of approval. Eva's brother - Dan, says that this record "may be the best Eva album yet".