Steve Winwood - Back in the High Life

1986 was a great year for music, and the summer soundtrack was particularly good that year. There were two albums in my collection that were joined at the hip, Peter Gabriel's So, and Steve Winwood's Back in the High Life. As the summer cooled down Bon Jovi would drop Slippery When Wet, followed closely by Paul Simon's mesmerizing Graceland. Those are just the tip of the iceberg, and are stories for another day. Still, when I think of Winwood, I think of Gabriel, I don't know why - they're really nothing alike other than they were a couple of Englishmen who reached their commercial peak at the same time.

I'm not going to go back and list off Steve Winwood's other accomplishments with bands like The Spencer Davis Group, Traffic, or that lone Blind Faith album ... the guy had laurels he could have rested on. Heck, with all that he was still only 38 (which seemed ancient back then) when he dropped Back in the High Life. By comparison, Tom Petty was 36 and when he joined The Traveling Wilburys he was considered the kid in the band at 38. Boggles the mind.

Although I liked a lot of the songs he did in those other bands, I can't say I was a huge fan. As far as his solo work, there were songs of his I thought were pretty good. Arc of a Diver had "While You See a Chance" which was pretty great and I do remember hearing "Valerie" a couple of times. It wasn't enough though to make me want to go out and spend my money. Steve's sound was kind of hard to miss. What makes this album so interesting is those signature little fiddle farty sounds are mostly absent. Musically everything is centred on Steve's voice, and he really does have a great set of pipes. The fact he's a superb multi-instrumentalist is just gravy and frankly a little unfair.

"Higher Love" is a brilliant song - so much so that it's synonymous with the album as far as I'm concerned. "Good song, good album." I do have to admit that after I got this I was actually kind of lukewarm to most of the other songs on the album. It was a time when I was spending a lot of money on music, and it was go big or go home and the mix tape was king baby.

Listening to it now for the first time in decades, the first song (THE BIG ONE) has come and gone and I remembered where my sense of ambivalence came from for the rest of the album. "Take It As It Comes" starts playing, and I just cannot get Kool & the Gang's "Celebration" out of my head. It's really irritating, and while the rest of the song is better than filler, I just cannot get past the opening. I suppose they're really not that close, but once heard cannot be unheard.

Thankfully things get better with "Freedom Overspill," a song I wanted to like more than I actually do, mainly because Joe Walsh played the slide solo on the song, and by gum anything Joe did was worth trying to appreciate (except for the perplexing Eagles final album Long Road Out of Eden that still sold more copies than I can fathom - over 7 million, come on, really?). However, it is a good song, for all that.

The first side closes out with probably one of my favourite songs on the album. The title track is a mid-tempo killer with a great mandolin part and a wicked counter vocal by James Taylor.

The second side opens with "The Finer Things" and hearkens back to the classic Winwood with his hints of his fiddle farty pitch bending keyboard sound that doesn't sound dated or stale but is so obviously from a point in time. From there he moves into "Wake Me Up on Judgment Day," a serviceable song that works in context of the album. It isn't one of my favourite pieces, but it's still superior to "Take It As It Comes" that I just can't wash out of my ears.

Joe Walsh makes his second appearance on "Split Decision," a song he co-wrote. Again, I hate to say it, but this isn't a song I was ever able to get into, and boy did I try. It doesn't help that Joe seemed to think that an un-tuned guitar added tension and dynamics to a song. He may not have been out of tune but it still brought dissonance to the fore. Now, after repeated plays it's starting to grow on me a little more, but I can't tell if it's just wish fulfillment, or it's actually good. Does it matter at this point?

The album closes out with "My Love's Leavin'" that is a great slow dance, and for '86 was right in the mix with the other cliched ballads that seemed to be everywhere. For all that, as I listened to the album it was a nice way to close out the album.

The album still sounds great. Much of the credit goes to Tom Lord Alge who mixed the album, and also served as engineer along with Jason Corsaro. Interestingly, Tom's brothers Chris and Jeff were among the assistant engineers. The ever dependable Ted Jensen mastered this one digitally at Sterling Sound, and yeah I'll go out on a limb here and say this sounds absolutely killer on vinyl and even better on CD (yes I said that, and say what you want you can't argue with me on this one).

Musically this was a really rich sounding record, and the blending of textures attained by mixing technology and organic instrumentation was delicately balanced on a tightrope. The opening track "Higher Love" hit it out of the park from the distinctive drum fill that starts the song by John Robinson, that was blending with programmed drums, the resulting tension added a dimension to the song that helped raise it to another level. While I may not have been as enamoured with several of the other tracks, I have to admit that when I had this cranked, it all worked as a cohesive listening experience.

I still stand by my original assessment that this is a really good album, and like my initial judgment all those years ago, it's based on the strength of the opening track. Like I said before, and I'll say it again, "Good song, good album."

Steve Winwood really was back in the high life again, even if only for a little while.