Newly-unearthed footage of Neal Casal performing “You Don’t See Me Crying” in 2013 was posted on the late guitarist’s Facebook page on Thursday. The video comes from a taping of the Japanese TV show On The Shelf.
Found on Casal’s 2006 album No Wish To Reminisce, “You Don’t See Me Crying” is one of many songs featured on the upcoming tribute to the Circles Around The Sun founder, dubbed Highway Butterfly: The Songs of Neal Casal. Beachwood Spark will perform the song on the record, due out next year.
The black-and-white video finds the veteran guitarist sitting on a bar counter, performing the song acoustically. As endless shelves of liquor bottles ascend behind him, Casal sings the song whose melancholy lyrics cut even deeper in the wake of his death. The entire message of the song, that somebody can be sad on the inside without showing it externally, reads as a call for help from someone who struggled with depression throughout his life.
Even as tributes and archival footage of Casal continues to emerge, videos like these serve as a reminder to cherish the time that the musician spent among friends and audiences alike. The all-too-prescient combined lyric of, “No one ever told me that this could all be gone in a/flashback to everything that we’ve been through,” says more than any synopsis of the video could.
Watch Neal Casal perform “You Don’t See Me Crying” for On The Shelf in 2013.
Neal Casal – “You Don’t See Me Crying”