SONG: You See Through Me

SONG: “You See Through Me” . (OGG version here.)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: The Guardian, 5 Sep 2024, “Common food dye found to make skin and muscle temporarily transparent“, as used in the post “Take a look inside by dyeing your skin transparent.”

ABSTRACT:
I’ve had the music ready to go for this once since mid-September, but for some reason it took me until now, the due date for November, to get the words written and recorded. I don’t really know why, although there was a trip to visit my sister in the middle there, and a lot of house cleaning, and who knows what all else. An election, I guess. A change in the weather.

Maybe it’s because this started its life in a purely arbitrary way, when someone said “Egad!” in an online discussion and someone else said “You could make a song out of that because those are all chords,” and one of those someones was me but now it’s been long enough that I can’t remember and I don’t really feel like looking it up. Doesn’t really matter – this song was the result. A country waltz.

Between then and now, I also for reasons that elude me started listening to myself late at night, when I was doing various writing-for-money tasks. By “myself” I mean old songs, ones that I recorded in 2021 and 2019. There were a few I never thought of as great before that now I think were really pretty good, like so and like so and like so. But I had all this music recorded for this song, here in fall of 2024. And it was not in the same mold as those.

It’s about being invisible, and wanting to be invisible because maybe at last if you were invisible, you wouldn’t have to explain why explaining things was so hard. You’re supposed to be good with words, so why can’t you just tell me? Because, I suppose, it’s hard. Easier to just paint yourself with tartrazine (of all things) and get your significant other to see through you.

I’ve written songs long ago about the object of one’s affection looking right through one, and that being a source of weakness – like, being overlooked also means I now have the power of invisibility. But this is the opposite, it is exposing all ones flaws and innermost self because how else can one explain?

There were a few mysteries in the recording process. Mainly, some of the first tracks were the organ parts, which include the accordion-like electric (not electronic) organ that for some reason didn’t get picked up correctly by the mic, so it sounded like it was being gated in a weird way, and I just went with it. Guitar solos that sounded better than they should have.

The vocals were all recorded on a headphone mic, mostly while lying in a bed on the far side of the house while everyone else was sleeping. I couldn’t do a regular vocal, so I just did the My Bloody Valentine “do a dozen or more takes, layered, and let it sound ethereal.” OK, that fit the theme, really. Not my first choice, but here we are. Now for another penitential cover, right?

LYRICS

have been a man of few words
I could try to explain / In a way that sustains

All the things that I think that we both understand
Then I fall back on gestures made with both hands

And apply the same silence that once said so much
The self-same cliches seem so out of touch

Unless you see through me
You see through me (x2)

(Now look…)
She’s tired of excuses, I’m yellow with age
And this feeling is stale when my voice always fails

I’ve got the vocab, but I’ve got enough rope
To tie up this tongue and abandon all hope

I can paint what I mean in food-grade tartrazine
And then you’ll believe all the things that you’ve seen

You see through me (x3)

(A good look…)
I’ll give her my heart, or at least a good look
And her eyes will grow wide when she sees me inside

When the beauty within shines out through the skin
When there’s nothing unknown in this muscle and bone

And I stand there alone, with nothing concealed
Our divisions are healed, my secrets revealed….

You see through m