“That the song would hit on that level so quickly was very unexpected on all fronts but the label situation had helped. Getting played on pop radio as well as rock radio, that’s just luck. You could have the Fugees, The Verve, Beck and Busta Rhymes all being played on the same radio station and that’s where Save Tonight did that crossover. Radio at that time was quite eclectic in many ways, pop music was so mixed. But when it comes to getting a massive worldwide hit there are so many other factors – timing is really important and I think we had the right song at the right time. “I felt that I’d written a really good song and when it came time to pick a single it was a no-brainer, everybody agreed. I wish I could fight the break of dawn.’ That’s really where I got to with the song. If you’re at a party or in a club or at home having dinner with your girlfriend, you get that feeling of, ‘This is so perfect, I don’t want this to ever end. Then the chorus is really about that feeling of not wanting the night to end. But that whole thing was something I grew up with and then used to do myself. I guess the concept was to make sure he came back. “Lyrically, it’s my childhood… Growing up with a father who was a musician and him always going on the road and my mum would cook a seriously good dinner and just create good vibes at home that last night before he left. That really gave the song a lot.Įagle-Eye: “Every songwriter hopes to write a song that stands the test of time…” The main thing Adam Kviman the producer gave us is that it was his idea to do the drop-down verse at the end which I think is genius, and then we bring the drums in for the last chorus. I think I might have finished the last verse later. The feel of the guitarist rhythm we changed up a bit, but the vision that I had laid down in the demo, the whole acoustic guitar-driven concept, the melody and lyrics were all mainly there from the beginning.

“The vibe that I heard in my head is pretty much exactly where we took it. I had played rock music in different bands and had listened to everything, so I wasn’t specifically like, ‘This is what I’m going to do,’ but by the end, when Save Tonight came along, I had realised, ‘Okay, I am working in more of the Americana pop-rock tradition and that’s what really turns me on.’ Save Tonight encapsulates that discovery of who I am, musically. By the end of making my first album, I had figured out who I really was, musically.

I felt like the album needed something a bit more uptempo, so that’s Save Tonight – which isn’t even that high tempo itself. Desireless is actually quite a laidback album and the tempo on most of the songs is pretty low. “It was one of the last songs that I wrote for the album. Especially when it comes to pop music, I think simplicity is gold. I didn’t even think about putting a middle eight in there. That’s why Save Tonight only has four chords. I then started getting into writing but hadn’t discovered the acoustic guitar until I got to Stockholm and borrowed an apartment that had one. I grew up drumming as a kid, with my dad and drumming in bands in New York. Once I could see what the story was, it seemed like it almost wrote itself and I just caught the song.

“Some songs are hard to write, they can take a couple of days, but I wrote this in just a couple of hours. I’m damn glad I stayed home that day because it changed my life. I stayed home on that sunny day and once I had come up with the line, ‘Save tonight, fight the break of dawn,’ I knew I was on to something. US chart position: 5“I’m pretty sure it was a Saturday, the day I would usually play football, especially on a day like that which was really sunny, but I started to get the song and I decided not to go out and play. In fact, it was the transient lifestyle of his father which inspired his most famous release, as he recalls here… We know it would be doing a disservice to the hours of practice and hard work that any musician puts into his craft to suggest that Eagle-Eye was always destined for such success but, as the son of jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and the half-brother of 90s star Neneh Cherry, he certainly had music coursing through his veins from the off. Eagle-Eye Cherry: “The more it took me around the world, the more my life became the song…” When this pop-rock classic landed on both sides of the Atlantic it became a self-fulfilling prophecy for its creatorĪ debut single which storms the charts across the world, propels its parent album to similar success and is played on the radio for decades to come must be the stuff of songwriting dreams for most artists, and it’s a dream which Swedish singer-songwriter Eagle-Eye Cherry realised in 1997 with his song Save Tonight a pop-rock classic which remains instantly recognisable to this day.

Save tonight eagle eye cherry