Eva Cassidy Album Featuring Previously Unreleased Recordings Coming in September

Since her untimely passing in 1996 from melanoma at the age of 33, singer Eva Cassidy has earned critical acclaim and an international following for her interpretive skills, selling some 12 million records in the process. WALKIN' AFTER MIDNIGHT, a new collection comprised of 12 never-before-released live tracks, showcases her versatile voice and sometimes familiar repertoire in a whole new light. 

Recorded on November 2, 1995 at the King of France Tavern, located in Annapolis’ Maryland Inn, the WALKIN' AFTER MIDNIGHT collection is atypical of the material Cassidy left behind. In an unusual turn of events, two of her regular bandmates, keyboard player Lenny Williams and drummer Raice MacLeod, were absent that night, leaving only Eva and her acoustic guitar plus the other half of her band—Chris Biondo on bass and Keith Grimes on electric guitar—to back her up. She invited award-winning D.C./Baltimore area classical, jazz and rock violinist Bruno Nasta to sit in, resulting in a new dynamic.

Eva Cassidy connoisseurs will recognize the bulk of the song selection—only “Down Home Blues” has never appeared on a previous Cassidy collection—but the approach is refreshingly different as symphony violinist Nasta transforms into a fiddle player for the night and Cassidy’s extraordinary voice fills the spaces left by the missing instruments. Rock guitarist Grimes responds with a lighter touch to his playing. Known for her wide-ranging, but unerringly tasteful, sense of material, Cassidy brings a cohesive western swing feel to WALKIN’ AFTER MIDNIGHT’s classic set list, including “Fever,” “Summertime,” “Route 66” and “Cheek to Cheek,” as if she planned it that way.
It would be two months after the Maryland Inn show that Cassidy and her band would record the set at the Blues Alley nightclub in Washington, DC that would largely define her posthumous career. One year to the day after the Maryland Inn appearance, she would be gone.

WALKIN’ AFTER MIDNIGHT will be released digitally on September 6 with a physical release scheduled for November 8 from Blix Street Records. The Irving Berlin standard “Blue Skies,” Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine” and the title track, “Walkin’ After Midnight,” are now available via all digital outlets.  

Listen to the three available tracks here:

The Eva Cassidy catalog of more than a dozen individual curated collections that showcase her extraordinarily versatile voice are also available from Blix Street Records, distributed by ADA.

WALKIN’ AFTER MIDNIGHT Track list:

Walkin’ After Midnight

Blue Skies

Next Time You See Me

Summertime

Honeysuckle Rose

Route 66

Ain’t No Sunshine

Fever

Down Home Blues

Wade in the Water

Cheek to Cheek

Won’t Be Long

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