The youngest member of the Cherry family reckons he got off lightly. A moniker many other kids would disown as soon as they were old enough to say it does not embarrass this 27 year old son of jazz legend Don, one little bit.
"I think I got a pretty good name!" he chuckles. "In my high school there was a girl called Experience, and then Cher’s daughter was in my class and her name is Chastity. So I think I lucked out. The story goes that when I was born, my dad was looking at me and I woke up and looked at him with just one eye. But hey! it was 1970 -- there were a lot of funny names going around at the time!"
Eagle-Eye will admit not only to an unusual name but to an unusual upbringing as well. Born in Stockholm, and brought up deep in the Swedish countryside daddy Don Cherry regularly packed the wife and kids (Eagle-Eye and big sister, the less fantastically named but no less fantastic, Neneh) into the back of a camper van and spent idyllic hippy summers on the roads of Europe, floating from avant-garde gig to airy jazz festivals. Perhaps as a result, wanderlust is rooted deep in the Cherry children. Moving to New York when he was fourteen, Eagle Eye has recently relocated back to Stockholm, to escape the "madness" of the Big Apple. In the past two years he has finally found the confidence to concentrate on his own music. After all, when your dad is an avant-garde jazz genius and your sister is having top ten hits while you’re still at school (albeit the New York School Of Performing Arts), there are certain pressures inherent in your own desire to succeed. Small wonder the uncertain young Eagle-Eye decided to become an actor rather than attempt to ply the family trade. After leaving the "Fame" school he made a name for himself appearing in everything from television adverts to parts in TV pilots and sitcoms and performing in the theater.
"It was wicked," he enthuses. "I graduated school, didn’t think I’d get to do anything and I got to do a bunch of cool things, made some very good money, didn’t have to work all of the time, got to learn a helluva lot working on bigger productions in bigger roles."
However, despite his increasing profile as a serious actor, Eagle-Eye wasn’t entirely happy. "The problem was, in the long run, I started feeling . . .y’know?" he stumbles to find the words to explain his artistic ennui. "As an actor you’re nothing without a good script or a good director," he manages at last. "I started feeling that I wanted to do something that represented me."
So the old adage says, you can take the boy out of the music but you can’t take the music out of the boy, and despite this love of acting it was to music that Eagle-Eye turned to express his frustrated creativity. He bought a keyboard and a guitar and spent nights in his New York apartment writing his first songs "just for fun." It wasn’t until he moved back to Sweden that he really began to concentrate, re-writing and honing the vignettes and personal revelations that would later become his debut album ‘Desireless’.
The album is a laid back, smoky blues opus. A collection of the personal and the perceived. Many of the tracks spin stories about New York acquaintances and the experiences of both himself and his friends. "Eagle-Eye leaves New York and tells people what he sees," is how he describes it. The city he left behind is a sometimes sad, soulful and strangely invigorating place. A place where you have to tell your girlfriend you’re leaving in the morning, where sleep provides respite from the pain of loneliness, where mermaids cry and grown men battle against the "snake" of temptation. Despite the powerfully emotive songs detailing the inner-dialogue of a gangster (‘Indecision’), or the futility of addiction (‘Shooting Up In Vain’ and ‘Death Defied By Will’), Eagle-Eye stresses that these are not drawn from entirely personal experiences.
"I’m a story teller, that’s the way I write lyrics. When I was younger" he offers, "I used to write songs about how I wanted the world to be. Now I’m older I’m writing about how the world is. I keep going back to the fact that I lived in New York and that kind’ve stuff is around you all the time. I’ve stood with friends and been like ‘what the fuck are you doing?. . .’ and then you loose them. . . I’m sure it’s the same in London. . . .But," he chuckles, "it’s just stories of bad people going down the wrong road!"
Having spent time in New York hanging out with the acid jazz crowd, listening to "loads of funk" and never without his Marvin Gaye collection close at hand, ‘Desireless,’ with its gently acoustic overtures and delicate string arrangements, is not the kind of loose-limbed open-ended groove you might have expected from the youngest member of the Cherry clan.
"When I started working on this album I didn’t really know what sort of sound I wanted or what was really gonna happen," admits Eagle-Eye. "As I was writing on acoustic guitar it really influenced my sound. It was through making the album that I started listening to people like Bob Dylan and Neil Young who I hadn’t really listened to before."
The final and eponymous track on the album, written by Don Cherry, is in some ways a tribute to his father who died while the album was being made. It’s a hauntingly beautiful, largely instrumental track and hints at the profound respect Eagle-Eye has for the father who landed him with such an unwieldy name. "Musically we had such an incredible dialogue," he says proudly. "If we didn’t meet we kept in touch over the phone. Some days when I got home, he would be on my answering machine talking about some new record he had bought, or he would just play the flute to me until the tape ran out."
Already a huge star, with a platinum plus album, in his native Sweden, Cherry has his eyes set on touring the U.S. next. As much as he loves writing songs, he still craves the limelight and cheerfully admits, that he wouldn’t be writing songs at all if he couldn’t get up on stage and perform at the end of it. As for the future, Eagle-Eye himself is far from being desireless.
"I probably would’ve had a Don Cherry song on the album regardless of whether he has passed away" he asserts. "When he died it was very sad but, he lived such a full life it was really a kick in my butt to get to work. You don’t know when you’re going to go and I know I haven’t done what I wanna do in this life so I better get to work on it."
-Official Eagle-Eye Cherry Website (WORK Group)