‘I Can See The Future’ Album Review: A Message on Time and Love

Once labeled a sad indie artist, it is hard to divert at all from what’s expected, which is what indie folk artist Leith Ross is currently doing. Known for their 2022 single “We’ll Never Have Sex,” Ross is known for exploring deeply personal topics — like love, mental health, and trauma — with a beautifully light and tender voice and an acoustic guitar (and occasionally other instruments). In a derivation from earlier work, Ross has brought a more energetic vibe for their most recent album, “I Can See The Future,” which explores similarly personal themes of adoration, hope, and development over time.

The opening song of this album, “Grieving,” establishes an optimistic mood for the album. While its name conjures dreary thoughts of death and loss, this song is surprisingly upbeat, being more about love than loss. This song discusses how people often vocalize more love and forgiveness for people after they’ve died, and that grief itself is an intense expression of love. Lyrics like “I never will stop grieving / Everything that’s yet to die” and “I think I’ll love after I’m dead / And I’ll grieve while I’m alive” express how Ross, in their everyday life, wants to love as fiercely and with just as much forgiveness as people do after someone dies.

Musically, “Grieving” also establishes a clear shift from previous albums. In their first EP, “Motherwell” and their first album, “To Learn,” Ross tended to use a mostly acoustic sound, with acoustic guitar being the main instrument featured. In “I Can See The Future,” Ross uses a more lively sound, with instruments like drums, mandolin, and banjo. While songs like “What My Love Is For,” “Stay,” and “‘What Are You Thinking About?’” have Ross’ original sound, the rest of the album has a more bubbly feeling. This more upbeat sound is bound to be exciting to some fans and disappointing to others. In specific, most songs on this album deviate from Ross’ musicality in their most popular song, “We’ll Never Have Sex,” which has simple, stripped down instrumentation.

While their sound has definitely evolved from that shown in “We’ll Never Have Sex,” Ross is still exploring many of the same concepts of love, and they specifically keep focusing on the emotional aspects of love rather than the physical. In this album, Ross explores a more mundane version of love, expressing the joy in small moments. In the song “‘What Are You Thinking About?’” Ross vocalizes how love can be found in small interactions as well as big ones through lyrics like “Oh, tell me something / It could be, hold me / It could be nothing / And I tell you / ‘Cause you ask.” This beautiful romanticization of everyday conversation evokes a sense of comfort in the mundane that carries over to other songs on this album, like “I Love Watching You Eat Dinner” and “Stay.”

Ross further explores the idea of love through their song “Point of View,” which describes the realization that you can never see your relationship from the other person’s perspective; you can only ever see a romantic relationship through your own eyes. This song is a unique take on empathy’s role in love — while it asserts that it’s important to try to understand your partner, you can never fully see how someone else sees the world. This take is refreshing in its achievability; it puts more emphasis on the process of trying rather than the outcome of achieving.

One of the strongest features of “I Can See The Future” is Ross’ storytelling ability: Ross is able to pull the audience in by setting up a compelling narrative, both within songs and throughout the structure of the album. The song “Alone” sets up a fascinating story of past relationships, which shows a theme of time that Ross explores thoroughly. With a steady beat and beautiful melody, Ross begins by describing a relationship between the world and a younger self — describing the world as “new and never been seen” and that 18-year-old Ross was seeing life with “stupid optimism” before describing an all encompassing feeling of being alone.

The narrative then shifts to a young relationship that left Ross “less than he had found,” and it concludes with a sweet description of their current relationship. Throughout, the chorus is simultaneously sweet and melancholy repetition of “I am alone,” and as the song progresses, there is a clear development in Ross’ view of solitude. The first two choruses describe being alone as “covering them,” conjuring an image of suffocation and darkness, but on the final repetition of the chorus, when Ross is speaking about feeling happy and being a better partner, they switch the lyrics to reflect being alone as “comforting” them. This lyrical change shows an ideological and personal development in Ross completes the story about growing up. As well as being a theme with wide appeal, the topic of growing up makes the listener feel more endeared to Ross.

Time is also expressed musically through “I Can See The Future,” which can be clearly seen through the songs “Grieving” and “Grieving (Reprise).” While the original song is upbeat, the reprise is slower and has a more sorrowful sound. While the reprise is entirely composed of lyrics from “Grieving,” the sadder tone is what is more expected of a song of this title. Despite this, it keeps its hopeful message. “Grieving” is the first song in the album, and “Grieving (Reprise)” is the second to last, making the album feel like it has a complete arc — as if Ross is taking the audience on their own personal journey, where they start out optimistic about love and how they want to love people, then ending more melancholy while still maintaining their longing to love people deeply.

The last, and titular, song of the album “(I Can See) The Future” further completes this arc despite not being about Ross themself at all. Throughout the whole album, Ross sings about how they want to love people, how time has changed them, and how they love others. “(I Can See) The Future” takes these themes beyond Ross’ own life by singing about how they can imagine an idyllic future where everything is beautiful, describing flowers and gardens and family, and everyone has everything they need. Beyond developing a beautiful life full of love and hope, Ross is more than optimistic for a better future where everyone can lead a wonderful life — they are certain this future is going to happen.