Kate Bush worked on the title song in a duet with lead singer and lyricist Stuart Adamson.

It is sometimes considered to be the band's most overtly Celtic album, with many of the songs containing explicit or veiled references to Scottish history - for example, "Remembrance Day" deals with the Highland Clearances (in which thousands of Highlanders were relocated to British colonial possessions such as Canada and New Zealand), "Red Fox" is about the 1752 Appin Murder, and the title track concerns the seventeenth century mystic the Brahan Seer.

Critic Anthony DeCurtis of Rolling Stone gave The Seer a positive review, calling it "possibly [the band's] strongest effort to date": Happily, Big Country's vision – articulated by Adamson's songwriting – is as generous and determined as ever.

The single "Look Away" and the ballad "Hold the Heart," both chronicles of lost love, capture Adamson's grim romanticism, his characteristic urge to transcend but not deny emotional ravishment.

"One Great Thing," "I Walk the Hill" and "Eiledon" are stirring expressions of the desire for individual integrity and a future filled with peace.