11. Eva CassidyOver The Rainbow

This is the other song – I’ll never forget the first time I heard it. A friend in Italy routinely put it on after lunch and I was just simply overwhelmed. I have to cry every time I hear Eva sing this. She makes the song her own, her voice perfectly recorded for crystalline intimacy. The vocal arrangement has the arc of a rainbow, moving ever up into the stratosphere, the sublime, and finally to the mystical proverbial end… It’s best to just stop completely to listen to this song, to be completely in it, to enjoy the subtlety and nuance and arc of the journey. It is so rich. Just one listening holds for a year.