Guitar Sessions 19: Play Brandi Carlile’s “The Eye”

Learn the accompaniment part for Brandi Carlile’s “The Eye” in Episode 19 of Guitar Sessions. The complete tab and charts for the lesson are available on Patreon.

See our cover video of “The Eye” and download a free mp3 below.

About the song

Here’s a new video of “The Eye,” recorded with Peg Newell and Wendy Sassafras Ramsay in memory of our friend Jack O. Bocchino.

As I wrote about in detail in this post, Jack was a legendary supporter of the music community in Central New York, and he loved Brandi Carlile and this song. We learned this arrangement a couple of years ago and were lucky to be able to sing it for him in person twice. On the first anniversary of his passing, we are sending out this video to Jack, his family, and all whose lives he touched.

“The Eye” is the result of Brandi Carlile’s extraordinarily close partnership with twins Phil and Tim Hanseroth, her writing and performing partners since 2000. Read more about their collaboration in this excerpt from my 2014 interview with the trio.

As Carlile noted in an NPR interview, “The Eye” originated in two separate song ideas that Tim was working on. She and Phil suggested that he merge the fledgling songs, she added a verse, and “The Eye” was born.

The trio’s original recording on The Firewatcher’s Daughter is gorgeous, and we stayed close to their arrangement, both vocally and in my guitar part (fingerpicked with C shapes and a capo at the sixth fret). To me, there’s just nothing better than singing close harmony like this, focusing only on the blend and the collective sound.


Chord/lyric charts and guitar tab for every episode of Guitar Sessions are available on Patreon.

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