Old Enough to Forget

I'll admit I'm sort of a sucker for this era of soft rock. It likely explains why I'm such a big fan of Christopher Cross ... no I am not kidding. Before Mister Cross though there were others - one of whom was Stephen Bishop. A year earlier he had contributed a couple of songs to Art Garfunkel's 1975 album Breakaway , and this helped him secure a record deal. Careless would feature some of the best players of the '70s: Andrew Gold, Jay Graydon, Larry Carlton and Eric Clapton played guitar, Russ Kunkel and Jim Gordon among others on drums, and Chaka Khan who was also on ABC records appeared as a backing vocalist on a couple of track. Art Garfunkel also appeared on a few tracks. For a debut this is pretty awesome. Stephen co-produced the album with Henry Lewy who also engineered the album. Lewy was no stranger to great sounding albums which included  Mitchell's Blue and Neil Young's Harvest . The album opens with Stephen Bishop's biggest hit - or at least ...

1986 was a great year for music, and the summer soundtrack was particularly good that year. There were two album 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...