My penchant for amassing hordes of cover songs, the deadliest of nostalgias, has gotten the best me. In search of repeat gratification, or at least a variation on it, I’d sift through genre after genre for that song. Somewhere along the line my misdirected worships became iconoclasm: after my tenth serving of said song and somewhere in the middle of the eleventh comes the earth-shattering, appendix-bursting realization I’ve been listening to the wrong one. Monuments are torn down, faces scratched off, souvenirs are sold next to the bathroom—someone has gone all Nietzsche on my songwriter and killed God.

Ironic thing is there’s only two versions of “Tall Trees in Georgia,” at least that I can find. The original was recorded by folkstress Buffy Sainte-Marie for I’m Gonna Be a Country Girl Again. It’s amazing; fragile and quivering, pocketed punches behind her soaring vibrato. But sometimes the guitar charges a little too hard, shoves the needle-sharp dynamics askew. Buffy’s voice is too vital, the vibrato too shrill, her voice too stern. Mind you, this is all in retrospect.

Eva Cassidy’s “Tall Trees in Georgia,” off her Live at Blues Alley, was probably sold at Starbucks once (which is to say, scoff-inducing in passing, instantly endearing upon listening). Her blushing introduction about how she’s loved the song since childhood, how she’s wanted to sing it for so long, threatens to derail it—an oncoming hand-in-forehead moment as someone stumbles through their adoration and worship. But then she starts singing and the room dissolves. It’s about losing love, trying desperately to get it back, and finding out everything has changed. Her voice is cosmic, soaring to cathedral highs, panning low, every note gossamer and lost. The guitar paces languidly below her, impossibly prudent, and immaterial as the rest. And where love songs are about empathy, your pain spilling into someone else’s, Cassidy can’t have it. She’s stuck meditating on the forever of action—and inaction. She’s a relic to her regrets, trapped by tall trees on one end and eternity on the other.

[buy stuff here]