What the late Eva Cassidy is trying to tell me about my future

I get sent a ton of advance CD copies of upcoming albums these days from labels and publicists who are hoping I’ll be persuaded to review the album or interview their client. Since most of them arrive unsolicited, I don’t feel too bad about the fact that they tend to pile up; I’ll get to them when I get to them. Every once in awhile I’ll jump on a new one immediately, but those are usually instances where I’ve already scheduled an interview with the artist and I need to dive in on the music as quickly as possible. Today, though, I received the new upcoming album from Eva Cassidy, and despite the fact that I knew almost nothing about her or her music, she went straight to the top of the pile for one reason: at last year’s Lollapalooza, Davy Knowles of Back Door Slam told me that he was signed to the same indie label as Eva, seemingly with some degree of pride. And if she’s good enough for the best young blues guitarist out there, then that’s good enough for me.

But ripping an entire CD into my computer, followed by manually typing in the track names (unreleased albums are rarely in the iTunes/Gracenote database yet), is enough of a pain that even if the music comes recommended, I’d like to quickly hear a song or two before I go through the hassle of converting the CD into a 21st century format. So I looked Eva Cassidy up on MySpace, which as obnoxious as the site may be, is still the quickest and easiest way to hear an artist’s work before deciding whether to explore further. Funny thing, though, she didn’t seem to have one. And there’s almost no such thing these days as an active musician who doesn’t have a MySpace page. So that was a clue that I missed entirely.

I went ahead and ripped the CD into my computer, started listening to it, and after hearing the first four or five tracks, I was totally sold. Before requesting an interview I like to do at least a little bit of homework beforehand (sometimes they reply immediately and ask if you want to do the interview the next morning, so you want to be prepared before you fire off that email request), so I looked her up on Wikipedia (hey, it’s just a starting point) and began reading about an “Eva Cassidy” but this one was deceased. And in that final moment of not putting two and two together, I thought about how odd it was that there must have been two different singers by that name, one’s still putting out albums and the other one’s dead. Then it hits me. I unfold the press release that came with the CD (I never even bother to look at the press release until after I’ve heard the music), and sure enough, the Eva Cassidy whose brand new album I’m listening to has been dead twelve years. And here I was a few minutes away from sending an embarrassing email to the publicist, asking if she could set me up an interview with her dead client.

It took a moment to get past the feeling of “how did I not know this?” that left me wondering how I could miss such a thing, but of course it occurred to me that the full extent of what I’d known about Eva prior to today was that she was signed to the same label as Back Door Slam; I’d never even heard of her before Davy mentioned her name, and never heard a note of her music until now. Back in 1996 I was in college, nowhere near the music industry, so I’ll let myself off the hook for not knowing my music history in this instance. But once I got past that initial reaction, what stunned me is that she was thirty-three years old when she died. I’m thirty-one. Selfishly I thought wow, what would happen if I died two years from now, what would be my legacy? And the truth is that I have no idea.

I feel like this past year I’m doing the best work I’ve ever done, and a lot of the feedback I’ve gotten seems to confirm that, but I don’t know what happens the next couple of years beyond the fact that they feel really important. Not because this singer died at age thirty-three and I’ll be that same age in two years. After all, fixtures like Hendrix and Cobain checked out at a much younger age than I am currently. For all I know I could step off a curb and get hit by a car tomorrow, or I could live to be a hundred and ten. It’s not a life or death thing at all. It’s more to do with the fact that I’m on the cusp of something, I’ve got a foundation laid now and at least a rough blueprint for moving forward, and these next couple of years I’ve got to step it up and I know it. Not because I’m getting older. But because it’s time.

Sometimes you get that buzz, and by the next morning whatever motivated you is long gone and it’s back to business as usual. But I don’t think this is one of those times. I’m staring at this album cover and the late Eva Cassidy is staring back over her shoulder, looking right at me, and trying to tell me something. Which is interesting because I don’t ever, ever get that existential kind of feeling from anything. I don’t know what she’s trying to say to me. Not yet. I’m not going to find it in the cover photo, nor in the liner notes or the press release, nor likely even in the music itself. What she’s trying to tell me is in my head, somewhere. I think it has something to do with the fact that I’ve gotten things to this level, in fact I’ve gotten the routine down pretty well at this point, and it’s time to take it to the next level.

Just don’t ask me what that is. Not yet anyway. But maybe soon.