I See a Darkness

The title track is the third song on the album. Songfacts describes it as opening like a confession from one friend to another, and the Guardian called it a tender ode to male friendship. Oldham told Pitchfork in 2001 that a girl in high school once said there are two ways of seeing yourself, as an essentially good person who tries to do evil or an essentially evil person who tries to do good. He thought the latter, and said that is basically what the song is about. He added that the death association is more prevalent when you hear Johnny Cash sing it, and that he had never thought of it that way.

Cash recorded it for American III: Solitary Man, released on 17 October 2000 and produced by Rick Rubin, with Oldham singing on it. Oldham called the experience so unreal that he did not know what it felt like, and said he got a lot out of listening to that version. Songfacts notes that Cash died three years later. In 2012 Oldham sped the song up for the Now Here's My Plan EP. The Guardian said the original creeps out slowly like fog while the new version skips along like a hoedown.

Live

An audience recording of his show at Maxwell's in Hoboken on 7 December 1998 has it seventh in the set. At the ABC in Glasgow in 2006, with the band Harem Scarem, the Guardian's David Peschek wrote that it was reserved for the encore and was devastating. In 2014 at St John-at-Hackney Church in London it came just before the encore break. It is on the live album Summer in the Southeast (2005) and, as a vinyl-only bonus track, on Is It the Sea? (2008).