“She could change the melody to something the band had not heard before on a gig-by-gig basis,” Biondo said. Her skill also meant she could improvise the tunes at will, as well as bend the notes with a sculptor’s care. But because those things were so natural to Eva, it allowed her to go right to the next level, which was to go inside the song and feel the lyrics.” “They have to think about the technical parts, about what the next note is and what the phrasing will be. “There are a lot of components to someone trying to pull off a tune,” he said. She would hear it in her head and then sing anything she heard.”īiondo believes that skill is what freed her to bring so much emotion to the songs. I watched her come up with three- or four-part harmonies out of nowhere. “A lot of people take lessons to learn music theory and how to do harmonies,” he said. Once she began to sing, however, he was instantly taken with her natural skill. ![]() “She was afraid to come inside because she had not done any recording like this before,” Biondo said. He met Cassidy in the winter of 1986 when, on the recommendation of a mutual friend, she came to visit him at his small home recording studio. Though many have come to similar conclusions since, Biondo was one of the first to do so. ![]() ![]() “By the time I finished the album, I came to the conclusion that this was one of the best singers ever.” “As soon as her vocal came on, I felt it was extraordinary,” he said. “We have this wonderful nightingale,’” Griffith told him, Straw recalled. It was another singer on the label, Grace Griffith, a friend of Cassidy’s from the Washington DC club scene, who introduced her music to Blix Street chief Bill Straw. Before making a deal with Eva’s estate, the imprint had achieved modest sales with recordings by jazz instrumental bands and Celtic singers, the best-selling of whom was Mary Black. The small label that set things in motion, Blix Street Records, seemed an unlikely engine to power such a success. ![]() But it never would have happened without the stalwart efforts of some dedicated supporters, as well as several connections that brought her songs to the attention of more media gatekeepers than normally receive credit in the tale. The story that emerged later – of a talent barely recognized in her lifetime, who went on to achieve rapturous posthumous acclaim – has become one of the most dramatic bad news/good news tales in pop history. This week will mark 25 years since Cassidy died of melanoma cancer, just 10 months after recording the live album she and Biondo had driven out to pick up that day. Given that, who could have foreseen that Cassidy’s music would one day generate a sustained catalogue that would sell in the multi-millions, creating chart hits all over the world? “At the time, we just hoped to make enough money to buy a PA system,” Biondo said. Over the course of the next few months, she would receive increasingly grim diagnoses of a cancer that had already begun to make quickening race through her body, robbing her of any chance of making a mark during her time on earth. Worse, by the summer of 96, the 33-year-old was facing something dire. After all, Cassidy had been performing for nearly a decade by then in relative obscurity and, while she had a number of meetings with record company executives in that time, they never went beyond the talking stage.
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