page_title: The Way I See It
section_title: Music and lyrics
hierarchical_section_title: The Way I See It / Music and lyrics
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo of the Hitsville USA building in Detroit MI. Photo taken: Monday June 19th, 2006 by Chris Butcher en:Category:Images of Detroit, Michigan
context_page_description: The Way I See It is the third album by American R&B singer, songwriter, and producer Raphael Saadiq. It was released on September 16, 2008, by Columbia Records, his first for the label.
  Prior to signing with Columbia, Saadiq had independently released his 2004 album Ray Ray, recorded with the songwriting and production duo Jake and the Phatman. He developed a creative partnership with their colleague, audio engineer Charles Brungardt, who shared Saadiq's fascination with historic recording techniques and equipment. In 2008, the singer returned from a vacation that had inspired him to pursue classic soul music and recorded The Way I See It primarily at his North Hollywood studio with Brungardt.
  Saadiq and Brungardt disregarded their previous experience in recording production while making The Way I See It. Instead, they experimented with older recording techniques in an attempt to recreate the Motown music aesthetic of the 1960s, producing a traditional soul album that emphasizes upbeat hooks and draws on the Motown Sound and Philadelphia soul styles.
context_section_description: The Way I See It has a traditional soul style fashioned after the 1960s Motown Sound and Philadelphia soul. It is a departure from Saadiq's previous work with neo soul, which bears a hip hop influence. J. Gabriel Boylan of The New York Observer said that Saadiq expands further beyond his work as a producer for other recording artists, for whom he encouraged a "classic aesthetic, heavy on organic sounds and light on studio magic, deeply indebted to the past and distrustful of easy formulas". BBC Music's Chris Jones interpreted Saadiq's use of 1960s soul as the album's source material to be a reflection of "America's most recent great political and cultural shift ... the first true post-Obama expression of hope in record form." Saadiq viewed his rootsy direction as a response to the state of popular music and found it analogous to modern politics: "You force so many terrible things on people, they get tired of it. We have a black president now."
  The album's songs draw on Motown's grooves, driving rhythms, tight drumming, tambourines in the rhythm section, guitar melodies, layered vocal arrangements, and two- to four-minute durations. They also feature bright melodies, swinging bass, sweeping strings, and snare drums that emit reverb. Cameron Carrus of The Lawrentian said that the most hook-oriented riffs are played on the bass and guitar, which blend "the low with the high", and cited "Keep Marchin'", "Love That Girl", and "Staying in Love" as examples. Jon Pareles of The New York Times viewed that Saadiq follows the example of 1960s Motown artists such as Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder, and Holland–Dozier–Holland, the label's songwriting and production team. Robert Christgau wrote that the album shares Holland–Dozier–Holland's "bright, swift, clearly hooked aesthetic". Saadiq sings in a tenor voice, which is slightly distorted as a result of the album's post-production.
  Saadiq's songwriting is characterized by straightforward romanticism, positive exhortations, pining ballads, and message songs. Christgau interpreted Saadiq's persona on the album to be "a romantic who stays true to the deliberate simplicity" of the song titles, but "never threatens to assume the fetal position if he doesn't get the extreme cuddling he craves." Patrick Varine of the Observer-Dispatch asserted that Saadiq deviates significantly from contemporary R&B lyrics: "there are no thinly-veiled food-sex metaphors or pimp fantasies". His songwriting also paraphrases classic soul lyrics and, on the album's slower songs, expresses tightly coiled emotions. Saadiq said that some songs were written about his life experiences. He described the album as "basically a series of love songs about music, how falling in love can be easy, but staying true to it can be tricky." He elaborated on this interpretation in an interview for the Chicago Tribune: "You have to watch out for those curves. Trendy music comes out, and how do you stay true to what you love? I’m not saying everything has to sound like a '60s record to stay true, but you should never take the relationship lightly."
caption: The Way I See It draws on the music of 1960s Motown (former headquarters pictured).
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