Seein' My Father In Me

Album: Sowin' Love (1989)
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Songfacts®:

  • We often become our parents, and that's not always a bad thing. In this song, the singer sees a picture of his father from his younger years and realizes they have a similar look and comportment. He starts to see the world through his father's eyes, and looks forward to a day when his children will do the same.
  • Paul Overstreet had a number of hits as a songwriter before launching his solo career. Many of his songs deal with family and fatherhood, including "A Long Line Of Love" (Michael Martin Murphey) and "Daddy's Come Around" (part of Overstreet's next album, Heroes).

    But the tightly bonded father-son relationship that manifests in his songs isn't true to life. Overstreet had a distant relationship with his dad, who didn't come home one day. It took him a while, but he came to terms with it and started writing songs about how he wanted his kids to feel about him. "I started writing things about what I wanted in life, and what I didn't have as a kid," he told Songfacts.
  • Overstreet wrote this song with Taylor Dunn, a fellow country songwriter who brought some of his own experience into the lyric.
  • The black-and-white music video features a collection of real fathers with their kids. "A lot of them were in difficult relationships, they hadn't been talking," Overstreet explained. "So they came to do this video together, and it kind of healed their relationships as well as people who would see it and hear that song."

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