Save Your Love

Album: Once Bitten (1987)
Charted: 57
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Songfacts®:

  • Great White was known for their rockers like "Once Bitten, Twice Shy" and "Desert Moon," but like any good '80s hair band, they could also pull off a power ballad every now and then, which they did with "Save Your Love."

    These ballads often offset the macho swagger by revealing the sensitive side of the singer. "Save Your Love" finds Great White frontman Jack Russell in a state of limerence, feeling like he's never apart from his girl because she's always in his thoughts. "Save all your love for me," he implores, not wanting to share.
  • This followed "Rock Me" as a single on Great White's third album, Once Bitten. Both songs were modest hits and helped build their momentum, which crested with their next album, ...Twice Shy. In the '90s, they faded as their sound was out of sync with the grunge era.
  • Jack Russell wrote "Save Your Love" with Stephan Williams, a guitarist who was briefly a member of the band. He also co-wrote their song "Waiting For Love" from their second album, Shot In The Dark.

    Band founder Mark Kendall explained in a Songfacts interview: "Stephan Williams was a very good friend of mine and I got him to play in Great White for a month, but he struggled playing live. He was kind of a nervous wreck. But if you get him into a room, he was tremendous at songwriting and stuff like that."

    Regarding Williams' contribution to this song, Kendall added: "He had this big bombastic intro and treated it more like muting, picking, and stuff like that. It just seemed like the structure was so pretty, that it would sound better delivered in a different way, acoustically and stuff like that. So, we used his idea, but we treated it differently, and delivered it in a different way."
  • The music video shows the band performing in a backstage setting amid various musical instruments, interspersed with shots of a beautiful woman who fills the thoughts of Jack Russell. At one point, we see her on a bed of rose petals, a look used years later in the movie American Beauty.

    The girl in the video is Tracy Martinson, the cover model of the Once Bitten album.

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