Music & More

  Photo courtesy of the artist On the surface, few artists would seem more antithetical to the image of Frank Sinatra than Willie Nelson. We'll skip the revelations about his voice not giving away his age and I'll just point out that he knows his way around a standard; he's written a few in his long, storied career. I'll rely on the Wikipedia to tell you that this is Willie's 71st solo studio album. That means that the number doesn't include groups that he was in, live albums, best of, etc. When you think about it, that number is truly staggering. That's Life is Nelson's second Sinatra tribute, his first being My Way (2018), and he's quite good at it. On  That's Life, we have fairly simple arrangements led primarily by piano, ably played by arranger Matt Rollings, and some exquisite steel guitar by Paul Franklin. The rest of the musicians are too numerous to name here, but there are plenty of gorgeous strings and saxes (among other instruments...

Photo courtesy of EvaCassidy.com If you've listened to Eva Cassidy, you probably know the beautiful artistry that she brought to her music. In the nearly two decades since the world became aware of her career, that was tragically shortened by cancer, it seems like everything that she had recorded has been released.  Acoustic is a twenty song collection of tunes that Cassidy recorded that consist for the most part of just voice and acoustic guitar. It was first released digitally in 2017. When I discovered it on Spotify then, I went looking for information about it and found none. Listening to it these last few years, I've been impressed with several things. These recordings pretty much represent the core of Cassidy's repertoire. Even though we may be used to hearing some of this material produced in different ways, the artistry and her singing style shines clearly on these tracks.  If I didn't know differently, this set sounds like it was all recorded in one afternoon....