“The hardest song to record”: The song Eric Clapton thought was never good enough
Some songs seem to arrive fully formed. An artist drops into a kind of mythical flow state and when they emerge from that trance, there it is. In the mystery of creativity, those moment of inspiration often strike like lightening, allowing something special to be written in an instant. But in other cases, it is a battle. Eric Clapton experienced both sides of that spectrum, but as he attempted to write about something truly unspeakably painful, the battle with his mind and his muses made it difficult.
Lived experience truly is the lifeblood of art. It’s the thing that fuels all the world’s best work: the best songs, the best paintings, the best stories. Even if there are fictionalised or exaggerated elements, no emotion ever comes from nowhere. Behind everything, there is a real-life, deeply human spark of feeling that powers it. It’s what puts meaning into art and what allows audiences to feel it, too. It’s one of the best things we as people have as we’re able to channel pain, love, hardship, anger, or any feeling at all into something beautiful and productive.
But sometimes, something is simply too painful even to consider. While some experiences can be turned into art instantly as a kind of immediate therapy, some are too big for that. When it comes to real, serious trauma, there often has to be a long reflective period. Sometimes, the artist has to heal first before they can bear to confront what happened in a song.
Clapton certainly felt that after going through perhaps the most painful experience a person ever could – losing a child. In March 1991, the guitarist’s four-year-old son, Conor, died after falling out of a window. It was a truly unspeakable tragedy that led to the musician isolating himself, stating it felt like he “went off the edge of the world” as his life was plunged into darkness.
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.”
“‘My Father’s Eyes’ went through five incarnations in the making of this record, and I would veto it each time and say each wasn’t good enough,” he continued, sharing how perfectionism became a kind of resistance as if he was finding fault after fault in the song all so he could keep working on this track that reflected his son’s memory.
Eventually, he found the strength to finish it, releasing the track into the world and letting his fans hold onto it, too, as a deeply personal memorial to his own grief that so many others can sadly relate to.
