"Fields of Gold" by Eva Cassidy

SONG TITLE: "Fields of Gold"
ARTIST: Eva Cassidy covering Sting
ALBUM: Songbird
YEAR OF RELEASE: 1998
WORDS: Sting Lyrics
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There's something in Eva that pushes every Weepy Puddle of Goo button I've got. She can reduce me to a quivering pool of emotion with half a verse, no matter how well I know the original version or how many times I've heard her recording already.

As the some Washingtonian wrote:

When radio stations play Eva, their switchboards light up. Many callers say they were in their car when they first heard her and had to pull over to cry. "Eva evokes that kind of reaction. Not just 'She's good' but 'Who the heck is that?'" says Keith Grimes, who was a guitarist in the Eva Cassidy Band. Cassidy had great control, phrasing, and range. She was petite - five-foot-two - but could belt out a bluesy "People Get Ready" as easily as she could sing a delicate tune like "Autumn Leaves." Some who heard this soulful Scotch-Irish-German woman thought she was black. It's more than Cassidy's technical skill that grabs people. It's the sense as she sang that she was reaching from her heart to her listener's. "There are singers that have great instruments but are just singing the notes," says Grace Griffith, a friend and local chanteuse. "Other singers have emotion but not the instrument. Eva had both."

I never really understood what phrasing meant in vocals until I heard Eva sing songs I already knew. Rather than pushing the words out into the world, it feels like the music is being pulled straight out of her by some intractable invisible force, every idea whole and nuanced and carrying a weight of meaning that I'd somehow missed before. This gives it a fragile vulnerability that completely at odds with her technical polish.

I'm sure some of the force of these emotions comes from the fact that she's dead and gone, and never had much commercial success when she was alive. I like the idea that she was leading a normal humble unsexy life, carrying around this huge talent that hardly anyone ever knew about.

There are lots of great articles about Eva out on the web, which you can easily find with your favorite search engine. Two of the best are "When Chuck Met Eva" and "Echoes of a Voice Stilled Too Early", both lengthy profiles in the Washington Post. There's also an article up on the official website specifically about her cover of "Fields of Gold".

"Ghanan Ghanan" by A.R. Rahman

SONG TITLE: "Ghanan Ghanan"
ARTIST: A.R. Rahman
ALBUM: Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India
YEAR OF RELEASE: 2001
WORDS: in Hindi with pop-up English translation available
DOWNLOAD: right-click here

This one is the latest entry on a long and glorious list of songs I've learned to sing phonetically. It started at the age of 11 with Menudo, when the fact that I didn't speak Spanish in no way diminished my teenybopper need to sing along. Not surprisingly, making the right Hindi sounds is a bit more challenging for this white girl than the Spanish ones. I have two additional decades of experience to apply to the situation, though, which pretty much means I can fumble along like a three year-old.

This is the first musical number of the first Bollywood movie I ever saw, and it is the standard against which all others are measured. Perfection!

"In the Summertime" by Mungo Jerry

SONG TITLE: "In the Summertime"
ARTIST: Mungo Jerry
ALBUM: In the Summertime
YEAR OF RELEASE: 1970
WORDS: text
DOWNLOAD: right-click here

One-hit wonders Mungo Jerry somehow flew under my radar for the first 20+ years in which their hit was riding the airwaves. I first recall encountering "In the Summertime" a few years ago, watching VH1 Classics in a hotel room with KJV. It was one of those vids-before-they-made-vids classics. Sometimes the lead singer's lips moved with one line of the melody and sometimes with another, and it was awesome. Like many unsuspecting radio listeners in 1970, I soon fell victim to the song's catchiness, and the resulting earworm stayed with me for an insane length of time. My water fitness instructor has this song on her regular workout mix, which always gives me a happy.

I'm still shocked by the lack of guile in the if/then parts of the song. Couldn't we at least pretend in our pop songs that wooing someone is a bit more romantic and less opportunistic? But in a bizarre and unexpected way that sort of adds to its kitschy appeal for me. Maybe it's that being so open about their opportunism seems naive - they don't know yet that they're not supposed to be sexist classist pigs, which makes it nearly sweet.

Or something. I dunno. I have a hard time with this one. Mainly, I just like the song. The tune is catchy and irresistible.