Eva Cassidy’s Time After Time
Eva Cassidy fans ask us all kinds of questions. Sometimes they are difficult to answer. For example: “If I buy one Eva Cassidy album which one should I pick?” (It’s a matter of taste) Last week, however, we got a question that made us think long and deep: “How many versions of ‘Time After Time’ did Eva Cassidy record?” Our initial reply was: two. But when we continued this conversation we found out that Eva sings this tune on three seperate albums.
Lyrics
The lyrics contain beautiful poetic phrases like ‘if you’re lost, you can look and you will find me,’ which are Lauper’s. Rob Hymen wrote the catchy phrase: ‘a suitcase of memories’. ‘Time After Time’ was not the first single of this album but ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,’ that Cyndi Lauper sang and gumbubbled into the collective memory. Her schoolgirl image probably stood in the way of real appreciation for the somewhat monotonous recorded track ‘Time After Time’.
Cyndi Lauper
The lyrics contain beautiful poetic phrases like ‘If you’re lost, you can look and you will find me,’ which are Lauper’s. Rob Hymen wrote the catchy phrase: ‘a suitcase of memories’. ‘Time After Time’ was not the first single of this album but ‘Girls Wanna Have Fun,’ that Cyndi Lauper sang and gumbubbled into the collective memory. Cyndi Lauper’s schoolgirl image probably stood in the way of real appreciation for her somewhat monotonous recorded track ‘Time After Time’.
Miles Davis
Thanks to Miles Davis’ instrumental rendition of ‘Time After Time’ on his You’re Under Arrest album (1985), Eva Cassidy became aware of the power of its melody. In the Dutch theatre show ‘Simply Eva’, Jerney Kate teaches her audience a vocal lesson based on ‘Time After Time’. Cyndi Lauper sang the words ‘Time After Time’ in the same way every time, Eva Cassidy chose for five different variations. Thanks to her thoughtful and effective phrasing, Cassidy emphasized the lyrics so that we can really appreciate this song. Eva Cassidy was also a visual artist and on her Time After Time album you can see the beautiful clock that she painted.
Time After Time
Back to the first question: “How many different versions did she record?” Our guess would be three.
The first one is on the Time After Time album. It’s a recording made at The Maryland Inn in the winter of 1995. Eva Cassidy performed with her band that night, but she also did a few solo songs including this one. Chris Biondo, who plays the bass guitar, recorded it using a DAT recorder.
Time After Time Painting
The second version is on the Simply Eva album from 2011. This is a recording of Eva Cassidy in Chris Biondo’s studio.
Finally, twenty years later, the recordings of the concert at Blues Alley on January 3, 1996, were released as the double album Nightbird. This album contains the third solo version of Eva, which she played live in front of the audience, under huge pressure because the recordings of the previous night had failed, so that every song had to be perfect that night. And that was exactly what Eva Cassidy and her band did.
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