But, slowly, music started to come back in again. As he attempted to move forward from the incredible loss, he began to channel it into his work. Some songs came quickly, like ‘Tears in Heaven’. But the deeper he delved into the tragedy, the harder it became, leading to the most difficult songwriting process he’s ever experienced when he tried to make ‘My Father’s Eyes’.
Clapton never met his own father, and in the song, he draws a line of connection between the eyes of the man he never met, the ones he sees in the mirror, and then the memory of his young son. “How will I know him? / When I look in my father’s eyes,” he sings, seeming to reference the idea of meeting God in heaven but also recognising both his child and his father when he sees these eyes he knows.
“‘My Father’s Eyes’ was the hardest song to record on the album,” Clapton said about the process of making Pilgrim, the record where he confronts grief most viscerally. When he came to make the album and finally put down on tape these songs he’d written in the wake of the loss, he found it incredibly hard as he explained, “It was one of the first songs, along with ‘Circus’, that I wrote after my son died. And it was the last one that I could let go of.”
Posted from: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/song-eric-clapton-thought-was-never-good-enough/
