Fiona Boyes is one of the best fingerstyle blues guitarists on the planet. … Read Full Bio ↴Fiona Boyes is one of the best fingerstyle blues guitarists on the planet. From Melbourne in Australia, but now resident in Portland Oregon, Fiona stands securely at a relatively young age among the new breed of blues players. She was the first woman and first Australian to win the solo/duo section of the Memphis International Blues Challenge.Her electric blues big band album Lucky 13 was a finalist in the International Blues Challenge in 2007.

Her big voice, her strong support of blues traditions and her distinctive style of playing make her one of the emerging greats of the blues.

Highly recommended are Blues In My Heart, an early acoustic blues album. and Lucky 13, a deliciously loose electric blues album.
Fiona Boyes has made a name for herself on the blues circuit, but when it comes to the specific types of blues that she performs, the Australian singer/guitarist/songwriter has not been the least bit easy to categorize or pigeonhole apart from saying that she is blues-oriented. Listening to Boyes for an hour or even half-an-hour, one is likely to hear a very wide variety of blues or blues-related styles. Texas blues, Chicago blues, Louisiana swamp blues, Memphis blues, and Mississippi Delta blues are all fair game for Boyes, who is as comfortable rocking out and embracing electric urban blues as she is playing acoustic guitar and embracing down-home country blues.
Boyes has never been a blues purist or a staunch blues traditionalist; rock & roll, soul, and jazz have influenced her work, and she obviously doesn't believe that a blues artist is obligated to favor a 12-bar format 100-percent of the time. But whatever she does — whether she is getting into jump blues, early R&B, blues-soul, rockabilly, or '20s- and '30s-style classic female blues of the Bessie Smith/Ma Rainey/Victoria Spivey variety — Boyes' work is always blues-related in some fashion. The artists Boyes has frequently found herself compared to include Bonnie Raitt, Marcia Ball, Susan Tedeschi, Lou Ann Barton, and Rory Block. Raitt, in fact, has been a major influence on Boyes, although Boyes' gritty work has a lot more in common with the Raitt of the '70s than with the sleeker, more polished and pop-minded Raitt of the late '80s, '90s and 2000s. But Raitt is only one of the countless artists who has had an impact on Boyes. An incredibly wide variety of artists has affected the eclectic Aussie to some degree, ranging from Smith, Rainey, Spivey, and Memphis Minnie to John Lee Hooker to Chicago-associated icons such as Willie Dixon, Buddy Guy, Howlin' Wolf, Koko Taylor, and Muddy Waters. Boyes obviously cherishes the Mississippi Delta country-blues of Robert Johnson and Son House, and she hasn't escaped the influence of Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin, either.
Boyes was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia, where she started making her presence felt in blues circles in the late '80s. It was in 1990 that Boyes and four other Australian women formed an all-female blues band called the Mojos, who recorded five albums in the '90s (The Mojos in 1990, Hardheaded Woman in 1991, Sassy Mama in 1995, Mumbo Gumbo in 1996 and Swing O'Clock Blues in 1999) and acquired a small following Down Under (the Mojos that Boyes was a part of shouldn't be confused with a British Invasion rock group of the '60s). But Boyes became a full-time solo artist in 2000, providing her first solo album, Blues in My Heart, that year; the acoustic Blues in My Heart was followed by Gimme Some Sweet Jelly Roll in 2003 and Live in Atlanta in 2004. In the mid-2000s, Boyes signed with the Memphis-based Yellow Dog label, which released Lucky 13 in 2006 and Blues Woman in 2009.

Website: Fiona Boyes

Stranger In Your Eyes
Fiona Boyes Lyrics

Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴

I thought I knew you, baby
But that was way back when...
When I was young and foolish
I thought that love would never end
And I just couldn't believe
The depth of your disguise
But now I look - I see a stranger in your eyes

I thought the world of you
But I didn't know
The man I trusted would ever stoop so low
And I just couldn't believe, could not believe
The depth of your disguise
But now I look - I see a stranger in your eyes

I see a stranger
Where I once saw a friend
I see a weak man
Where my hero used to stand
You don't want to admit
That what you've been doing is wrong... it's so wrong
And now I find out
You've been doing it for so long

I thought I knew you
But that was way back when...
When I was young and foolish
I thought that love would never end
And I just couldn't believe
The depth of your disguise
But now I look - I see a stranger in your eyes

Now I look - I see a stranger in your eyes
I look, I see a stranger in your eyes...

Overall Meaning

The song Stranger In Your Eyes by Fiona Boyes is a reflection on a failed relationship. The singer once knew their partner well, or so they thought, but as time passed they began to see a different side of them. They describe feeling young and foolish in the past, thinking that love would never end. However, the reality is that the person they loved was not who they seemed to be. The singer starts to notice the depth of their partner's disguise, and now sees a stranger in their eyes. The person they once knew so well is now unfamiliar.

The song is a powerful commentary on the idea of deception and how people can hide their true selves from even those closest to them. The line "And I just couldn't believe, could not believe, the depth of your disguise" illustrates the singer's shock and disappointment upon realizing that their partner was not who they thought they were. The repetition of "I thought I knew you" throughout the song highlights the singer's sense of betrayal.

Overall, Stranger In Your Eyes is a haunting and emotional song about the fragility of relationships and the danger of not truly knowing someone.

Line by Line Meaning

I thought I knew you, baby
I believed I understood you completely, my love

But that was way back when...
However, that was a long time ago

When I was young and foolish
Back when I was naive and imprudent

I thought that love would never end
I had faith that our love was eternal

And I just couldn't believe
I simply couldn't accept

The depth of your disguise
How deceptive you truly were

But now I look - I see a stranger in your eyes
But now when I see you, I no longer recognize the person behind those eyes

I see a stranger
I see an unfamiliar person

Where I once saw a friend
Who I used to know as a close companion

I see a weak man
I see a feeble individual