If You Could Only See

Tonic frontman Emerson Hart wrote this song after a tense phone call with his mother. Hart was 21 years old and planning to get married - not what his mother had in mind. She tried to talk him out of it, but you can't argue with love. Emerson told her: "If you could only see the way she loves me, then maybe you would understand," and then he hung up. With his fire sparked, Hart started writing the song, and it came very quickly, with him taking aim at his mother's "manipulations" and "lies" during the strident verses, then slowing it down to present his side of the story in the chorus. The song was very cathartic and helped him work out his feelings, but in the end his mother was right: it didn't work out with the girl and they never got married.

This was Tonic's first single, but it almost didn't make the album. The band got a deal with Polydor Records after playing clubs for a few years in the Los Angeles area. When it came time to record their debut album, Emerson Hart wasn't sure if they should use "If You Could Only See," since it was a very vulnerable song and he wasn't sure how it would be received. Polydor, however, loved it and made sure it was the debut single. The song was released to radio and MTV, but in the interest of album sales, was not sold as a single. This made the song ineligible for the Billboard Hot 100, but pushed sales of Lemon Parade past one million. The song made #1 on the Mainstream Rock chart and received very consistent airplay - it lasted an astonishing 63 weeks on the Airplay chart, peaking at #11 in December 1997, long after it had been released. Tonic had a minor hit with "Open Up Your Eyes" (#68 Airplay), but never came close to matching "If You Could Only See."

The music video finds Emerson Hart searching desperately for the girl who is being kept away from him. It was directed by Ramaa Mosley, whose other credits include the Creed videos for "What's This Life For" and "Higher," and the movie The Brass Teapot. Mosley looked to French cinema for inspiration - notably the 1960 film Breathless and 1963 movie Contempt. "I started envisioning this combination of a love story mixed with this kind of communist oppression," she said in her Songfacts interview. "I locked myself in my house and listened to the song hundreds of times and the story just kept building."