Tonic, "If You Could Only See"

I once saw a horrible cover of this song by some anonymous bar band. The original is hardly any kind of zenith in rock history and holds its place amongst the many pop-rock tunes floating along on adult contemporary radio, but watching a group of hacks try and Creed it all up was still really a shame.
“If You Could Only See” won’t ever be considered one of the 90s’ most clever, thoughtful, or consciousness-raising songs, but you won’t find many other full-on rock songs that charted with this much raw sappy sincerity. Tonic’s radio-friendly rock popped up on the charts a few times in the 90s and early 00s, this one landing higher than the rest. Emerson Hart’s vocals waver somewhere between coffee shop singer-songwriter and the post-grunge growl as he tries to convince some unnamed listener that he definitely should do the vague “what I must do.” The video, with all the thin melodrama of a youth group skit or an episode of Melrose Place, leads us to believe that perhaps murder is the case. Without the video, “If you could only see how blue her eyes can be when she says she loves me” doesn’t make a whole lot of sense upon first, second, or three hundredth listen, but it resonates when you’re a teenager whose hormones surge and crest the same way as those slide guitars. As a result, the song soon became vastly overplayed, perhaps as an attempt by deejays to counter the boy band takeover.