If you’re looking for an album this autumn to gently encompass you like windblown and swirling fallen leaves, then Leith Ross’s new album, I Can See the Future, is for you! If you’re a fan of the intimate lyricism and soft, yet powerful, vibe of Folklore and Evermore by Taylor Swift, Immunity by Clairo, and/or Deeper Well by Kacey Musgraves, this album is for you. This is an album to listen to while sipping tea by the fireplace with a quilt wrapped around you or while taking a walk through the changing, falling, paper-thin colors. It’s an album that reminds us of how love is intertwined in the seasons of endings and change in our lives: the autumns. This article will give you a rundown of why each song is so dear to my heart.
Track 1: Grieving
Favorite lyrics: “For grief is love run backwards/ A great movie in reverse”
The upbeat yet melancholy tune of this song indicates Ross’s acceptance that to love is to grieve and these are inseparable feelings and inevitable parts of the human experience.
Track 2: Point of View
Favorite lyrics: “I hope you feel love, you feel it in the way I do (do you? Do you?)”
Ross wishes they could view love through another point of view so they would be able to fact check if their own experience of love is present in other people. Ross describes the loneliness to not just love, but to the whole of the human experience.
Track 3: Treasure
Favorite lyrics: “Savour it, sip it, it’s sweeter than sitting in/ With cynical stiff lip, bearing your teeth”
Ross tells us that if we don’t savor our present, then we are skipping over our happiness and fast forwarding through life, which is no way to live. Soon, change will arrive, so sit in this moment, even if the moment’s new and unknown. “Feel it, you aren’t fit for what you’ve always been/ Fleeing it, give in, let it be new”.
Track 4: Stay
Favorite lyrics: “When you love, I feel it/ When you’re cut, I’m bleeding/ Choosing to believe it/ That you’re gonna stay”
Be vulnerable to the feeling of hope. Let it drive you. Hope might turn into a slasher, but Ross chooses to open themself up anyway to the possibility of getting hurt because they believe in the possible positive outcome and lets this drive their decision.
Track 5: Terrified
Favorite lyrics: “What if it hurts me?/ What if I die?/ But what if it feels good?/ If I feel alive?”
Ross admits to their fear of change that stands at odds with the side of them that wants to do this new thing. They have a choice to make: let anxiety rule their life or do what they want.
Track 6: Home
Favorite lyrics: “Oh, I swore that home was heavier/ And maybe it’s the gift of getting there/ But I’ve never felt so far”
Ross grieves their childhood and is searching for the home they once felt in a physical house. Now they’re looking for this sense of home in people. They’re adjusting to how home feels different and is more abstract in adulthood and how returning to their childhood home feels different too.
Track 7: What my Love is For
Favorite lyrics: “Oh love, you’re blessed wiring/ You are every intention/ Oh love, you’re something hiding/In the logical construct of a body I can touch”
Ross describes love as something that doesn’t conform to external structures like time, the body, or what’s able to be seen. They describe it as transformative, fluid, and inseparable from their true self. Essentially, they send the message that: love is yours and you are love.
Track 8: I Love Watching You Eat Dinner
Favorite lyrics: “I, all my life, have been aching just to feed you”
This song describes Ross’s longing to know a person more because the act of getting to know this person nourishes them like food.
Track 9: I Will
Favorite lyrics: I can’t hate you, how could you hate me now?/ Because I loved you, I love you still/ Though it’s painful, darling, at least I’m filled”
They establish love as surpassing the laws of time. They still remember what it felt like and they know love will never completely leave their life, just like how the way this person made them feel will never change just because it ended.
Track 10: “What Are You Thinking About”
Favorite lyrics: Oh, tell me something/ It could be, hold me/ It could be nothing/ And I tell you/ ‘Cause you ask”
This song relishes in the joy of being able to talk about nothing. No performance, just the presence of the company you love so much.
Track 11: Alone
Favorite lyrics: “There is a whisper in the coldness of the wind/ And it’s sudden and it comforts me/ I am alone.”
This song describes the simultaneously freeing and sad truth that no one can ever know you like you know yourself.
Track 12: Grieving (Reprise)
This reprise establishes a main theme in the album of the experience of grief being inevitably intertwined with love. It’s a slowed down version of “Grieving”. Soft, fragile, and beautiful.
Track 13: (I Can See) The Future
Favorite lyrics: “flowers, flowers, flowers grow/in the brick and the stone/ of the prisons and roads”
Nothing is permanent. Flowers can sneak through the cracks and transform what seems impenetrable. Look around you, be community-oriented, be hopeful. Remember that spring follows autumn and winter.
Ross explores the fragility of the human experience, but describes it as fragile like flowers rather than glass. The difference: flowers have grown and will grow once again. We can change exponentially and it is a power that will never cease if you nourish it with hope, gratitude, and love. Ross argues for their listeners to try their utmost hardest to live the present to the fullest, but vulnerably describes their own worries about the future and grief of the past. All of this is what makes us heartwarmingly and heartbreakingly human. Thank you, Leith Ross, for an album that softly sang sweet everythings.