I was staying at my friend Wes’ apartment in Hell’s Kitchen when I wrote “I See You Clearly.” It was prompted by a conversation that I had had only a few days before with Genevieve, the woman I had recently broken up with. She had said that she felt like I didn’t see her, which I found a strange thing to say given that we had lived together for several years. I knew that she hadn’t meant it literally, but it seemed like one of those creative spins on a problem that left me with no means of addressing it. And yet, I felt that I did see her. Perhaps I saw her more clearly than she realized.
The song began with me plucking a repetitive riff on the guitar, and then the words flowed pretty seamlessly. Nothing about the song struck me as unusual. It seemed pretty standard at the time, but the sentiment was what made it interesting, I suppose. Probably the best lines in the whole song come in the bridge:
We can’t seem to know
That life is a bow
And we are all arrows born to fly
We push so hard
Just to move backwards
Until we turn around and sail through the sky
Bridges are tricky, and I’m of the mindset that you skip it if you don’t have a good one.
The Recording.
The Navigators snatched this song up right away, and it became a staple in our set. When we went to record Glory, Glory, its inclusion was a no-brainer. The song eventually became the single for that album. If you knew the Navigators, you knew that song. So it might seem like a curious thing to re-record it. Right?
I certainly didn’t need to re-record it for The Heights. The same is true for “Sooner or Later” and “Russian Roulette.” But I really wanted listeners to enjoy the full experience. This is one of the few collections of songs where every song written during this period made it onto the album.
Of course, the album is not a rock album, so none of the earlier versions would fit. For this version, I went back to the way I originally played it. It all begins with the plucked guitar part. Little by little, a new instrument comes in so that when you get to the bridge, you have a full soundscape.
I played everything on this but the horns- I called in Small Batch Brass for that. We managed to record this song and “Madman on the Loose” in an hour. They learned and performed quickly. I highly recommend them, if you need some musicians on your next record.