Can you see the future? Canadian singer-songwriter Leith Ross can. For their new album, “I Can See The Future,” Leith dives deep into what it means to have a platform, master the lost art of community, and be a beacon of change.
According to the singer, “I Can See The Future” is a distant concept; there’s a world they’re searching to create, all the while knowing it’s a world they may not see within their lifetime.
Love for all? Check. Acceptance? Check. A world full of community members, rather than one where “individuality is the order of the day?” Double check.
But how do we get there?
We take the first step.
And that’s exactly what Ross is doing with this album. “I Can See The Future” isn’t about perfection or utopia; it’s about movement, care, and radical tenderness in a world that often prizes detachment. The lyrics are laced with love, a soft, deliberate instrumentation accompanying each track like a tender hug. It’s about loving, losing, and knowing that there’s something bigger out there; In a word, the album itself is embracing. “I wrote it from the perspective of a person living hundred or thousand of years from now – however long it takes in the world that I feel like I’m fighting for now in my life,” says Ross. “I thought it would be meaningful, metaphorically, to kind of have most of the songs book-ended by grieving and then have “I Can See The Future” be an outlier, almost as proof that it’s separate and almost as like an homage to the fact that that future will happen after I’m dead. It is bigger than me and it is beyond me,” she share in a press conference with 1824.
Yet, there’s also a quiet rebellion in Ross’s work; they aren’t shouting their message from the rooftops, but rather providing a quiet insistence that softness is strength. Recognizing community as a core value, Ross is making this dream a reality: “I’m trying to be a more active community member,” Ross states, citing that it seems we may have lost track of what the word truly means. Do we really know our neighbors, living right next door? Do we feel that connection, that humanity, when we pass them by? For Ross, that’s one step closer to the future they’re building.
One of the singer’s favorite tracks on the album? The title track, “(I Can See) The Future.” Told from the perspective of someone living in a time beyond Leith’s own, the song envisions the realization of a long-held dream: a simpler world where connection reigns supreme and kindness is shared as freely as candy on Halloween night, given without expectation, but reciprocated in spades.
Ross recommends you listen to the album while “driving to a new place or back to an old place,” windows down with a slight breeze in your hair. There’s a certain nostalgia to the album, a warm welcome of something Ross feels in their heart but simply hasn’t seen yet.
So can Leith Ross really see the future? Maybe not in the traditional sense. But they’re doing something even more radical: they’re making it feel possible.
Check out their latest album here.