Painful Sight "Time to Reflect"

A look inside the story of "Painful Sight"


Hello and welcome back for another story time session with me, your host, Willy. Some wonderful people call me Willy Sunshine, and you know who you are :) This week I'm going to share some more inside stories of the songs from "High Noon" my first full length music album. I'll start by explaining my beginnings in songwriting. I started playing guitar by myself, learning Jack Johnson and John Mayer songs. As you can probably imagine, it made for some pretty interesting songwriting styles. Being a beginner at guitar, and discovering an intense passion to write and record music myself, I started writing like a maniac. I had written upwards of 50 songs within the first couple years of starting guitar. You may be asking yourself, "How many have you written since then?" well I couldn't tell you exactly, but I know its at least 300. Anyways, around the 50 song marker is when I really started wanting to write "folk" music. I hadn't written anything remotely close to being able to define with a genre, and now I knew which one I truly wanted to try to write. "Painful Sight" was the first of these. I was listening to a lot of Iron and Wine, Joshua James, Rocky Votolato, and M. Ward. If I were to trace my inspiration back to a specific song, I would say "Resurrection Fern" from Iron and Wine's "Shepherds Dog" album. I was moved by the simplicity and the wonderful visual story that it created in my mind every time I would listen. I took that concept and made it my own, and I'm grateful I did. "Painful Sight" is one of my favorite songs of my own work. It paints a picture and uses literal situations to convey emotional unrest. Then in the third verse the literal and the figurative slam together. Often times we want to do what's right, we want to see the light in every situation, but ultimately we fail. It's a cry for help to overcome pessimism, and be optimistic no matter what may happen. I'll let you decide for yourself what it means to see through God's eyes, but to me it means seeing the good in everything, and looking forward with continuos hope for a brighter future.

Funny fact!

Often times I would listen to the track and the part where I say "prayin for release" I hear myself saying "prayin for Elise" haha I don't know any Elise, but she sure has gotten a lot of prayers from me whoever she is. Maybe it's an Elise that you know. Will you let her know that I've been praying for her? Thanks in advance.

Please feel free to email me any questions or memories on facebook or at willyeklof@gmail.com
and share this with anyone you think might enjoy it :)

To summarize, this is one of my favorites from the album, and definitely will continue to be one that I play forever. Until next week. Thanks for reading and sharing this "Time to Reflect"