(The photo above was taken in Vancouver, B.C., in front of the basketball courts at David Lam Park with a view toward False Creek.)
From the title of this post, you might have thought I was going to write about some juicy gossip or start a rumor. But I don’t do rumors or gossip.
This is about a weekend trip I took to Vancouver, British Columbia, and about a song called, “Let Them Talk”, which I heard for the first time about three weeks ago.
The Puget Sound is an exceptionally beautiful area around Seattle.
Viewing it with the naked eye, or in this case, viewing it with my eyes “clothes’d” (meaning covered by my eyelids…not naked….”clothes’d”) for lack of a better picture 😩, hyper activates my senses.
I can See the Sound, Smell the Sound, Hear the Sound, and Hear the See…..well, the Sea. 😁
Early this morning, while it was still dark, I backed out of my “parkway” (it makes more sense than calling it a “driveway”, right?), paused for a moment to sip some coffee and listen to the song on the radio that was just ending, and then as if to signal to the radio DJ that the “audience” (me) was ready and he could start up the next song, I put it in drive and slowly headed down the road to go to work.
Then after a few seconds of silence, a beautiful guitar chord progression started to play and I soon realized it was the song Autumn Leaves.
That got my attention.
I just wrote a post called “Autumn Leaves” on October 7. At the end of that post, you can listen to Lisa Simone sing her version of “Autumn Leaves”.
The lady singing the song this morning, on the radio, sounded a lot like Lisa so I thought it might be Lisa doing a different version than the one she is singing in my previous post.
So, later on, I searched the playlist on KNKX, the local NPR station I was listening to, to see if it was Lisa who was singing.
Turns out it was a woman named Eva Cassidy. I had never heard of her before. So I googled her and down the “youtube rabbit hole” I went.
This is her version of “Autumn Leaves”. I think it is an equally beautiful version of the song.
As I listened to her version, I noticed another youtube video of “The story of Eva Cassidy”, which was produced by ABC Nightline. So I listened to it.
Her story was interesting but sad. She died at 33 from cancer, before she ever became popular or knew fame.
The people who appeared in the Nightline documentary who knew her and talked about her said she was shy and afraid of what fame might do to her. That she loved to sing any genre as long as she liked the music and the lyrics and she connected with the song. They also said when they listened to her they were blown away by her voice and raw talent, without the need for any fluff or gimmicks. That she had a mellow voice and that she was very melodic when she strayed away from the melody and came back to it. That she was stylistic in her own way. And not willing to change herself for the music execs to be what they wanted her to be. She remained true to herself. She was eclectic and sang blues, folk, pop, soul, rock, jazz and gospel.
As I was listening to all of them talking about Eva, it seemed like they could have been talking about Lizz Wright. There are many similarities between the two. And although I wasn’t blown away by Eva, I do like Eva’s voice and style of singing too.
But for me, no one will ever top Lizz. I was blown away by Lizz when I first heard her sing “Reaching For The Moon”. She’ll always be my favorite.
So now it is evening. I finished work and came back home. And as I write this, I think about serendipity again.
The leaves are still falling all around here in Seattle. And I’m still loving the Fall and wishing it were longer. The fiery brilliance of all those leaves at their peak, stir up passion and warmth in me, and in all of us, I think.
It was 330 a.m. when I slowly pulled away from the house and the beautiful guitar chord progression grabbed my attention. Then, to my delight it was a cool version of Autumn Leaves. How did they happen to play that song on the radio, at just the right time of the morning, when I had just got into my car? Also, I usually listen to Lizz’s music when I go to work. But this morning I didn’t. Serendipitous? I think so.
I’d like to end this post with a beautiful, audio-visual collage of “Autumn Leaves”.
It’s Fall at its finest with Eva’s version of Autumn Leaves playing in the background.
It’s brought to you by David Borg, Eva Cassidy, and me.
I never get tired of Autumn Leaves-both, the song and Nature’s fiery brilliance.
In my previous post, “Autumn Leaves”, I mentioned some old black and white photos I found. They were photos of me and three friends hiking in Yosemite National Park and climbing Half Dome.
On the backs of two of the photos, I discovered “two different thoughts” I had written down on them. I copied the thoughts from cards I saw when I was down on the Monterey Bay pier, just enjoying the day. I think I bought the cards to send to a good friend, at the time, but I liked the sentiment on each card and wanted to remember them, so I wrote them on the backs of those pictures, the only thing I had handy, at the time, to write on, before I dropped the cards in the mail.
In that post, I mentioned only one thought, which was about Autumn Leaves.
But in this post, I’d like to mention the other thought, on the other photo, which was someone’s (it was so long ago I don’t remember the source) idea of what success means.
Everyone will have their own definition of success, of course, but I thought this definition of success had merit.
Fall in South Korea, around 1978.
The other day I was filtering through some old photographs and I came across these pictures:
This is Half Dome in Yosemite National Park.
At the time, three friends and I were attending an intensive language course at the Defense Language Institute (DLI) in Monterey, California. Two were studying Arabic. One, Russian. I was studying Korean.