The Cherry Of His Father's Eye

08/06/1998 4:00 PM, LAUNCH
Steven Mirkin

Eagle-Eye Cherry grew up around music; his late father was the brilliant jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and his half-sister Neneh's 1989 album, Raw Like Sushi, was critically and commercially acclaimed. "There wasn't a day in our life that didn't include music," Eagle-Eye remembers. So the release of Desireless, Eagle-Eye's shimmering debut, is the result of a lifelong dream, right?

Well, not quite.

It's true that Eagle-Eye has been playing music almost since birth; he was taught the drums as a toddler. "My father thought the drum was the first instrument," he explains, "he'd say, 'Without rhythm, there's nothing.'" There were other concerns, Eagle-Eye explains with a laugh. "He was also thinking ahead; it would be practical to have a drummer around." But like most kids, somewhere in his teens Eagle-Eye's rebellious gene kicked in, and he decided to forego a musical career. So when he enrolled in New York's High School For The Performing Arts, it was in the acting program.

His family was supportive of his decision. "My father' was really open-minded," Eagle-Eye says. "Whenever I got a part, he'd call everyone up and tell them." But even though his acting career was picking up (guest spots on The Cosby Show, a role on the short-lived TV series South Beach), he was unsatisfied. "Theater and film were more of a director's and writer's mediums," he says. "And I was really getting into doing something on my own." That something, as one might expect, was music.

With the money he'd earned from acting, Eagle-Eye settled in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn and bought a sampler, a MIDI keyboard and some other equipment, and quickly started to make inroads in New York's acid-house underground. But a decision to move with his girlfriend to Stockholm, Sweden had the biggest impact on his musical direction.

"The first apartment we stayed in had a acoustic guitar," he explains, "and I started messing around with it, which was something I hadn't done in a while." That day, he wrote two songs, and there was no turning back.

While Desireless's lyrics and lilting melodies evoke the glistening effervescence of Summer in New York, the songs were written and recorded over a Winter in Stockholm. "When I left New York," Eagle-Eye explains, "I got perspective and started telling stories. When you're in the middle of the madness, you don't always see the pain and effect." The Swedish climate, both emotional and atmospheric, contributed to the Desireless's sense of calm. Had he recorded in New York, he muses, "it might have been more like traffic jam music."

The album's elegantly spare sound is also a result of advice from his father. "He used to say to me, 'Don't be afraid to be simple.'" The scary part of simplicity, he explains, is that the music becomes the focus. "We tried to really keep the focus on the vocals, the stories. I wanted people to pay attention to my voice and the lyrics as opposed to thinking 'that's cool loop,' or a 'cool sample.'"

One result of the album's success is that Eagle-Eye finds himself living out one of the songs. "Save Tonight," the first single, is a "bittersweet song about that last evening you spend before you have to go away for awhile." The irony of it all is "the more successful the song has become, the more my life has become the song. I'm now the guy who's always leaving someone behind."