“If I Had Eyes” by Jack Johnson

"If I Had Eyes" was the first taste of Sleep Through the Static, Jack Johnson's fourth album, turning up late in 2007 on the Brushfire Records website before iTunes got it on December 11. Johnson plugs in here: there's more electric guitar than usual, recalling his On and On days, and the groove slides between acoustic lilt, jazzy phrasing and a touch of the blues.

Lyrically it's a quiet ache about a long relationship coming apart, though the spark came from somewhere much sillier: his 3-year-old son Moe, who answered a tall tale about growing an eyeball-tipped tail by building one out of his own arm and telling his dad he looked good. JP Plunier produced, Robert Carranza engineered and mixed, and the handclaps come courtesy of Plunier, Josh Arroyo and Emmett Malloy.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.