Imagine

As her top-selling album Songbird proved, the late Eva Cassidy didn’t merely sing songs. Instead, she moved into them, rearranged the furniture and left them usually in better condition than she’d found them. Imagine is the fifth collection of her often breath-taking interpretations of songs from a wide range of writers, from Lennon of the title track to the otherwise unheard ‘I Can Only Be Me’ by Stevie Wonder.

The sparsely arranged ‘Fever’ simmers with sexual celebration through an approach that owes more to Little Willie John’s version than to more familiar, subsequent takes. ‘You’ve Changed’ has her smouldering with regret à la Billie Holiday, a feat she repeats on ‘Still Not Ready’ which has the added benefit of some smoky sax playing from Les Owen.

Cassidy somehow manages to suck all that country corn out of the hackneyed ‘Tennessee Waltz’ and delivers a peach of a pop-country gem that makes the song live and breathe again. With her voice, her guitar and her big heart she nearly achieves the same miracle with the similarly overdone ‘Danny Boy’, but that task is too superhuman even for Cassidy, while her winsome take on ‘Early Morning Rain’ adds surprisingly little to Gordon Lightfoot’s original.

But these are minor blemishes on what is an album made even more delicious by Cassidy’s unpretentious and supremely personal performances. What a pity she didn’t live long enough to hear the applause.