Henrik & Eva

Herbie Hancock said it best to me. He said: 'You know there are good musicians in every field of music and there are some that are great, really great, but then there are those few who have that magic, that other dimension, that must come from God,' and that's how I feel about Eva. (p. 135)

She looked at it as love. She focused on the words of the song and the love that she felt with the singing. When Eva sang, she sang from her heart, not from her head. Her intention was always to sing her love, to help change other people's lives. She sang because she loved singing and she wanted that song, the sound of her voice, to help change the lives of other people. That's why she never wanted to sing anything except what was coming from her own heart. (p. 139)

Elsewhere on this site you will find Torbjörn's account of how he and his wife Mona started taking down the lyrics for Eva's songs and how this grew into an ambitious project with the goal of transcribing every song we could get hold of (in all honesty we still have a few up the sleeve). I am very glad to have become part of this project. Not quite two years ago I wrote a note in Laura's guestbook in which I expressed the view that the discrepancy between Eva's self image and her greatness as an artist was reminiscent of Franz Kafka, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson. Torbjörn is a Kafka connoisseur, so he sent me a mail, and I soon got involved in his great project. Torbjörn is not only dedicated and persistent, he is also extremely well-read and a  generous and wise person. I very much enjoy our email exchanges about Eva, human nature, philosophy, literature, music, art, South Swedish Barbie Doll mock palaeozoology, Bumsi (feline), Thibaud (canine), cargo cults in the Pacific, health and ill-health. I hope Mona, Torbjörn and I will some day meet at The First South-Scandinavian Cassidist Get-Together.

The site itself should be easy enough to navigate and its contents reasonably self-explanatory, at least to Cassidists and Evamaniacs. Yet a few notes about editorial principles are perhaps in place. Backing vocals have not in all cases been transcribed; they often weave in and out of the lead vocal in a way it would require a good deal of graphical dexterity to reproduce, and very often the page would be just too cluttered. In the lyrics for duets, I have put parts sung by Eva in bold type and parts sung by both Eva and her duet partner in small caps. I would have preferred italics for the latter, but italics often look lousy on a computer monitor. In the notes to the songs, when I list the records on which a given Eva song is found, the names of records including the same version of the song are grouped under a common version number (e.g. '#1'). When two or more such groups are found these different versions are either a) from different recordings, b) have vocal and/or instrumental tracks in differing mixes, or 3) there are sunbstantial differences in track length. CD singles are referred to by record number. In the notes, names of Eva Cassidy CDs are usually abbreviated as follows: AT (American Tune), EBH (Eva By Heart), I (Imagine), LABA (Live At Blues Alley), LAP (Live At Pearl's, a bootleg), MA (Method Actor), NB (No Boundaries), S (Songbird), TAT (Time After Time), TOS (The Other Side), WW (Wonderful World). 'Stray songs' is not the title of a CD, bona fide or otherwise, but just a heading under which I have gathered various songs from compilations or other artists' CDs on which Eva sings lead or backing vocals or duets.

There are probably those who will find the notes to the lyrics a tad pedantic, but I know others value the degree of detail.

Henrik in Denmark.