I Can See Clearly Now

The version of this song that most people know is actually Cliff's recording of a composition by Johnny Nash, which was then covered extensively — but Cliff's original recording has a specific quality that later versions tended to wash out. The arrangement is spare and almost fragile at first, building gradually as the lyric opens from personal clearing into something genuinely transcendent. The production captures an unusual quality of optimism that isn't naive — it sounds like joy that has been through difficulty and still arrived at joy, which is a considerably rarer thing than simple happiness. Cliff's voice in the upper register has a brightness that functions almost like an additional instrument, cutting through the mix in a way that feels involuntary and completely natural. The song has a structural trick: the verses describe the clearing of obstacles in such specific terms that you feel each one lifting, so by the chorus the relief is genuinely earned rather than stated. It became a standard and was subsequently drained of its specificity by overuse, but the original recording still has that quality of a specific person, on a specific morning, genuinely feeling the clouds give way. Best experienced when you actually need it rather than in ironic appropriation — there's enough sentiment in it to sour easily but enough truth in it to sustain repeated honest listening.