Eagle Eye Cherry

The Mark:

If you still own the same car you did in the 90's,
there's a good chance either this or Jagged Little Pill
is hiding under your passenger seat.

When you first think, 'Eagle Eye Cherry,' my guess is that you instantly started singing Save Tonight in your head... heck, I loved the whole album that song was on, and even my mind went there first.

My Connection:

The year was 1997: "Save Tonight" was everywhere. All the time. As someone who had just started learning guitar a few years prior, I also loved that I could play the whole song knowing only four chords!

One of the things that I really love about Eagle Eye Cherry's acoustic style, though, is how much diversity of sound he's able to get from just a few chords thanks to his strumming chops. I remember being super pissed that I couldn't play this whole song before my right forearm got too tired trying to keep up with his rapid-fire 16th note strumming.



Style Notes/Structure:

Eagle Eye Cherry doesn't just go percussive for this one song, though. Front-to-back, his catalog of songs are pretty simple *chord-wise*, but lord help you if you can't strum fast or off the downbeat.

As for the lyrics, the three songs I think of when I think of Eagle Eye Cherry are, "Save Tonight," "When Mermaids Cry," (see below) and "Conversation." Even though the lyrical content varies pretty greatly between the three, you can hear the same kind of style in each one - clean acoustic guitar with fast rhythms.


A CRIMINALLY UNDERRATED SONG THAT DESERVES ITS OWN LARGER CAPTION. Also, I've never watched this video before and I'm eerily enthralled with how little it has to do with the actual lyrics.

It wasn't until I was a few years beyond "Save Tonight" that I was able to come back and appreciate it for having such a complex rhythm (the number of hits/notes in a given beat of a song, ***not*** how fast the song is).

Listen to the first video above - in the first 8 seconds, he strums his guitar about 22 times. If I were to count the rhythm out loud, assuming that we're counting 16th notes per the, "1 E AND UH" method (with the four syllables 1 E AND UH representing 4/16 of a given beat in a measure of 4 beats), it would sound something like:

Am                           F

1 AND 2 AND UH 3 E AND 4 AND UH 

C                              G(ish?)

1 AND 2 AND UH 3 E AND 4 AND UH, 

Two measures, 11 syllables each, 11 x 2 = 22. Math!!

Oh yes, there's math involved....

When I first started playing this song, I just tried my best to flail my hand to make it match what Eagle Cherry was playing. I quickly learned that if I was going to play this song anywhere near what it actually sounded like, I was going to have to be able to strum both down AND up on the guitar. Although I don't think I figured it out while playing this particular song, learning "Save Tonight" was certainly the first moment in my music career where I realized how the direction my right hand was moving correlated with specific beats and points in a measure. Hmm...

Can you match what someone's playing without knowing the math?? Sure thing! It just tends to be a little harder when you're playing Save Tonight versus something like...






NOT THAT THERE'S ANYTHING WRONG WITH BEING A SLOWER SONG/HAVING AN EASIER RHYTHM. **

Please commence with rocking on, then proceed below.








My Take:

Rather than focus on the, "Hey, we're not going to see each other anymore" angle from Save Tonight's lyrics, I instead thought more about how Eagle Eye Cherry's strumming affected my thinking about the right hand/rhythm as the driving force behind a song. From syncopated/accented hits on the guitar to a few stretched out/breathier tones while singing, I did my best to take myself back to 1997 while writing my *first* song for this blog.

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**Editor's Note - I actually wrote tempo instead of rhythm here the first time around. Goes to show just how confusing the two can be, and here I am trying to ask you to understand the difference without really explaining it all that well. Whoops. ~