"Can’t Unsee" by Echo Drift

"Can’t Unsee" is not a song—it’s a reckoning. In the hands of Echo Drift and lyricist Samuel E. Burns, this piece becomes less of a performance and more of a postmortem: of a leader, a nation, and perhaps most hauntingly, of collective denial.

From the very first lines—"Once you see it, / you can’t unsee"—the listener is warned. This is a journey into uncomfortable clarity. The lyrics don’t describe an event so much as they peel back its layers, revealing the rot beneath. Burns’s words are surgical, precise, and often devastating. A figure stands at the center of the poem—a man in power, a "shadow dressed in ceremony"—no longer commanding language, caught mid-thought, mid-self. The imagery is stark and elegiac. What’s most chilling isn’t what is said, but what is withheld: a nation pretending not to see what’s plainly visible.

What Echo Drift brings musically to this piece (assuming the tone follows the lyrics) is likely minimalist and brooding—atmospheric, even funereal. The song doesn't offer crescendos of hope or melodrama. It offers, instead, truth. And truth, as this work argues, is rarely convenient.

Burns draws a connection between personal decay and national erosion. “You can't build a country on illusion,” he writes. “Can't lead with a hollow man.” This isn’t just political commentary—it’s moral indictment. In a particularly haunting section, the lyrics shift to observe the silent complicity of others: “shielded by loyal hands / who knew better— / but said nothing.” It’s the silence after the fall that echoes longest.

The final lines are raw, intentionally fractured: “Become hole again. / Hole again. / Hole again.” It’s a powerful pun—"whole" becoming "hole"—emphasizing loss and absence. The repetition mimics the echo of a wound that hasn’t healed, a chant with no closure.