See The Light

Album: See The Light (2007)
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Songfacts®:

  • Writing this song was therapeutic for Bo Bice, and his hope is that it may help someone else discover the good that's been hiding in the shadows of their lives. "It's kind of a redemption song," he explains. "Everybody's been down, everybody's felt imprisoned. But we're all going to get through it. We all work hard and try our best, so to me it's like... cross the river, past the smoke screen in your eyes. It's a congregation, you're going to see the congregation. It's about seeing the light."
  • Bo Bice wrote this song with his keyboard player of several years, Thomas Lee. In a Songfacts interview with Bice, he explained: "That was one of the songs that was written where Thomas wrote certain things. Thomas wrote some of the melody line and some lyrics, and then I came in and ripped that song apart, wrote a chorus to it and changed a few lines here and there. So that was like two different coasts writing. I think Thomas was in LA writing, and I was back on the Nashville road on that song at the time. So it was a song he had initially written himself, and then I came in and changed and kind of made it my own. It's really cool. That's the beauty of teamwork.

    When Thomas recorded that, he had this drum track that was kind of just a looped drum track. And Steve Gorman from the Black Crowes played the drums. And we loved the loop and the way it sounded, so we had Steve go just one time through to just get that loop sound sample that you hear, and then the big drums kick in. So that was a cool layered song. I remember working on different parts of that from the dobro to the harmonica, and just the loops. There was this one part in 'Witness' that we call 'Witness Weirdness.' It's in the breakdown after the talk box solo. And there was a bunch of reverse tracks; I would play something on guitar, we'd splice it, we'd cut it, we'd reverse it, put effects on it, all this stuff. And it ended up sounding like that. We did some of the same stuff on 'See The Light.' But I co-produced this album with Frank Lidell. And 'See The Light' is the one song, I think, had the most presence of Frank Lidell on it. He really had a lot to do with that, with the background singers and hymn. Frank shined, really shined through on that."
  • This, says Bice, is a nice representation of the "swampy" music side of him. And where he comes from, that means roots rock, music that is a diversification of Zydeco, Cajun, country/western, and blues.

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