“I’ll Be Seeing You”
Song by Ray Charles
“I’ll Be Seeing You” is a gentle ballad from the 1967 Ray Charles LP Listen. His singing, soft and vulnerable, is matched by insistent strings that ornament an otherwise slow and steady beat.
A brass section takes a kind of solo in the middle part of “I’ll Be Seeing You”, after which Ray returns and sings the rest of the song falsetto, an infamous experiment he undertook throughout Listen. Ray’s falsetto on this song has some great moments, where the melody drops down a little and he almost drops into his usual range — he doesn’t, but there are a few tense seconds when you think he might, moments where you can detect an odd timbre in his voice. The sound of a strong man on very shaky ground.
Ray ends “I’ll Be Seeing You” with quite a flourish: a super-high and dramatic vocal finish as the brass pounds out a few pummeling notes of goodbye.
Listen to “I’ll Be Seeing You”
Songs on Listen