Song Inspiration, Lyric Development, Personal Meaning, Intended Message or Other Insights
“Illicit Visions” isn't simply a song about desire, and it certainly isn't about believing that every thought or desire should be acted upon. For me, it is about recognizing and accepting what is happening inside your own mind while still respecting another person enough to understand that your thoughts don't determine their intentions or give you permission to cross their boundaries.
The song came out of a period when I was still learning how to live normally in society again after spending just over five years in prison and then nearly a year adjusting to life after my release.
The opening reference to “six years of cold walls” has more than one meaning. Just over five of those years were spent surrounded by the literal walls of prison. But when I came home, the isolation didn't simply end. I returned to a house that was now largely empty, and for nearly another year those bare walls became a different kind of confinement.
So when I wrote “six years of cold walls,” I wasn't describing six years in prison. I was combining those two periods of my life—the years of physical confinement and the year of isolation that followed after I came home.
One of the adjustments during that first year was simply being around women again.
From my first day at my new job after prison, I became very aware of that. After more than five years without ordinary physical intimacy and affection, attraction could feel almost primal. It wasn't something I could simply switch off because I was back in society.
At the same time, I was extremely conscious of how I behaved.
It wasn't a secret at work that I had recently been released from prison. The people around me were friendly and accepting, but I was constantly concerned that I might say or do something that could make someone uncomfortable or cause offense. I guarded my words and actions carefully while learning how to interact naturally again in a mixed-sex workplace.
What I couldn't guard quite as easily was my imagination.
I've always had a very vivid and active imagination. So while outwardly I maintained my professionalism, internally those newly awakened feelings sometimes went somewhere entirely different.
They became illicit visions.
There was another part of my life developing at the same time. Like many people today, I ventured into online dating. I was spending a lot of time alone at home and wanted someone to talk to. Over time, I found myself communicating with several women.
Some of those conversations became more openly flirtatious. Without my asking for them, I began receiving pictures that made it clear that at least some of these women were interested in exploring something beyond simply being online chat partners.
One of those pictures arrived while I was on a break at work.
When I returned to what I was doing, the image remained in my mind. At some point, the words “I see you naked” started going through my head.
I kept repeating them.
Then I started humming them.
Throughout the rest of the workday, that one line and the little tune attached to it kept returning. The melody I was humming eventually developed into the musical foundation of “Illicit Visions.”
The rest of the lyrics grew out of the intersection of the two lives I was living at the time.
At home, I had the online conversations, the pictures and the freedom of my imagination. At work, I was back in the real world, surrounded by people who were simply being friendly and accepting while I carefully learned how to conduct myself again.
Those two worlds sometimes collided inside my head.
There could still be that private glimmer of “what if?” when interacting with someone I found attractive. But I also understood that friendliness was exactly that—friendliness. Whatever possibilities my imagination created belonged to me. They weren't an indication of what another person wanted.
That struggle comes through again in the third verse:
“six years of nothing, now you're all I crave,
Walkin' this line trying to behave”
The “six years of nothing” reaches back to that same period represented by the “six years of cold walls”—more than five years incarcerated followed by nearly a year of isolation after coming home. Here, though, I'm speaking more specifically about those years without physical affection and intimacy.
“Walkin' this line trying to behave” is just as important to understanding the song. The desire is there, and I'm not pretending otherwise. But I'm also consciously trying to conduct myself properly and in the way that is expected of me. That tension between what is happening privately in my imagination and how I choose to behave toward another person is at the heart of “Illicit Visions.”
That's an important distinction in understanding the song.
“Illicit Visions” isn't about one particular woman being the object of my desire. Different real experiences contributed to it, but the deeper subject of the song is the internal struggle I was experiencing while readjusting to society.
My imagination could run wild while my actions remained grounded in reality.
In that sense, having an illicit vision isn't the same thing as committing an illicit act.
Thoughts, fantasies and desires are part of being human. We can acknowledge that they exist without being ashamed of them, but we can also recognize that having a thought doesn't give us the right to turn it into someone else's reality.
For me, “Illicit Visions” is about learning to live honestly with both sides of that experience—the private world inside my head and the responsibility I had for how I treated people in the world outside it.
Sometimes the imagination is free to go somewhere reality cannot.
And sometimes respecting another person means understanding exactly where that line is.