In Your Eyes

Gabriel has said the lyric works for a man and a woman or for a person and God, in the spirit of an African songwriting tradition. He called the eyes a focus point for the soul, and Daniel Lanois remembered the idea of eyes as the doorway to a thousand churches. The song was restructured several times across six reels of tape, and a discarded groove verse was replaced with parts of an unfinished piece called Sagrada. Gabriel wanted it to close the album. On the original vinyl it sat early, because of its prominent bassline, and it moved to the end on later CDs.

Youssou N'Dour sings a Wolof section at the end, in what was his first recording with Gabriel. Jerry Marotta said N'Dour arrived hours late and recorded in about thirty minutes, and Gabriel called his voice liquid gold. Manu Katche and Marotta played drums, Tony Levin and Larry Klein bass, David Rhodes guitar and Richard Tee piano, with backing vocals from Michael Been and Jim Kerr among others.

Say Anything and after

It was the second US single from So in August 1986. It topped the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart and reached number 26 on the Hot 100, and it was never a UK single. In Cameron Crowe's Say Anything..., released in April 1989, Lloyd Dobler, played by John Cusack, holds up a boombox playing the song outside Diane Court's window. Gabriel at first refused the request, having confused the film with the Belushi biography Wired, and then agreed after seeing it. He said the scene gave the song a second life. A shorter edit of the song reached number 41 on the Hot 100 after the film, and in 2005 it became his first gold single.

On the 1986 and 1987 tour he sang it as a duet with N'Dour, and the 1994 live album Secret World Live closes with a version of more than eleven minutes. In 2011 the New Blood album gave it an orchestral version of 7:13. N'Dour joined him for the performance at his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in Brooklyn in April 2014. In October 2012 John Cusack walked on at the Hollywood Bowl with a boombox, and at Madison Square Garden in 2023 Gabriel held an inflatable one.