Album of the Day — July 2
Steve Winwood — Back in the High Life
Steve Winwood — Back in the High Life
02.July.2020
Steve Winwood
Back in the High Life
1986
Possessing one of the most distinguishable voices in rock and roll is no easy thing … but everyone has their cross to bear.
That is Steve Winwood’s … along with being the voice behind some of the most well-known songs in rock and roll.
As a teen, Steve Winwood had hits with The Spencer Davis Group — “Gimme Some Lovin’” — and then with Traffic — “Dear Mr. Fantasy” — and then with Blind Faith — “Can’t Find My Way Home” … and then back to Traffic.
By the mid-70s Steve Winwood had grown tired of the record, tour, record, tour grind and he “retired” from music. — kind of.
Eventually, Winwood would pursue a solo career.
In what can only be described as one of the shortest retirements in rock and roll, he released his first self-titled solo album in 1977.
Three years later, in 1980, he released the top 5 album Arc of a Diver, which contained his first solo hit “While You See A Chance”. In 1982, he dropped Taking Back the Night, which contained the hit “Valerie” — both of these albums self-produced.
Release the hounds.
In 1986, Steve Winwood resurfaced with the juggernaut Back in the High Life. The album contains a much more hygienic sound than his previous solo efforts but Back in the High Life would end up being more commercially successful than those albums combined.
Along with producer Russ Titelman, Winwood enlisted a who’s who of music to help him, including:
Chaka Khan
James Taylor
Joe Walsh
James Ingram
Niles Rodgers
Once the record had wrapped, Winwood’s label of 20 years, Island Records, took over. And for some reason, the four years between Taking Back the Night and Back in the High Life, warranted a marketing campaign built around the word “comeback”.
By everyone’s estimation, including Winwood’s, he hadn’t gone anywhere.
Nonetheless, the marketing worked.
Back in the High Life would go on to sell over five million copies in the US alone, get nominated for six Grammy Awards — winning three including the first single “Higher Love” winning for both Best Pop Vocal Performance: Male & for “Record of the Year.
Back in the High Life had three hit singles (and seven of the eight songs on the album were released as singles), and while the album never reached #1 (the highest was #3 in the US) it cracked at least the Top 20 album chart in almost every country in the Western World.
As he had on his previous two albums, Steve Winwood partnered with songwriter Will Jennings to write the majority of the songs on Back in the High Life.
The album opens with the steel drum (or drum machine) sounds of “Higher Love” (a #1 hit with Chaka Khan) and is easily one of the most identifiable intros in rock. The song is rather ambiguous in its meaning. What exactly is this “Higher Love” he’s looking for? The love of another person? Or is it something more ethereal:
Higher Love
Think about it, there must be a higher love
Down in the heart or hidden in the stars above
Without it, life is wasted time
Look inside your heart, and I’ll look inside mine
Things look so bad everywhere
In this whole world, what is fair?
We walk the line and try to see
Fallin’ behind in what could be, oh
There has been speculation about whether some of these songs are in some way reflective of a longing for a kind of spirituality, seemingly Christian. Neither Winwood nor Jennings have said as much … but it shouldn’t be discarded. The seventh and final single off the album, “The Finer Things”, adds fuel to the fire:
The Finer Things
While there is time
Let’s go out and feel everything
If you hold me
I will let you into my dreams
For time is a river rolling into nowhere
We must live while we can
And we’ll drink our cup of laughter
The finer things keep shining through
The way my soul gets lost in you
The finer things I feel in me
The golden dance life could be
I’ve been sad
And have walked bitter streets alone
And come morning
There’s a good wind to blow me home
So time be a river rolling into nowhere
I will live while I can
I will have my ever after
If Steve Winwood was on some kind of spiritual vision quest with Back in the High Life, he hasn’t acknowledged it … although the chorus to “Wake Me Up On Judgement Day” raises the eyebrow even further:
Wake me up on Judgment Day
Let me hear golden trumpets play
Give me life where nothing fails
Not a dream in a wishing well
The best song on the album is easily the title track “Back in the High Life”. The song is dominated, but not overpowered by, three things:
Steve Winwood’s masterful mandolin playing.
The lyrical maturity.
James Taylor’s backing vocals.
“Back in the High Life” is less a quest to go back to what once was, but a song about desire — a desire to re-connect. While there is a reflective quality to it, it’s neither shame nor pride. It’s just the voice of a man who has grown-up.
Now, here again, there are a few interpretations one can make of this song. One, he (presumably Winwood) wants the “high life” of rock stardom OR he longs to connect (or re-connect) with another person(s)… OR is it a desire to be basking in the glory of some kind of spirituality:
Back in the High Life
It used to seem to me that my life ran on too fast
And I had to take it slowly just to make the good parts last
But when you’re born to run it’s so hard to just slow down
So don’t be surprised to see me back in that bright part of town
I’ll be back in the high life again
All the doors I closed one time will open up again
I’ll be back in the high life again
All the eyes that watched me once will smile and take me in
And I’ll drink and dance with one hand free
Let the world back into me and on I’ll be a sight to see
Back in the high life again
You used to be the best to make life be life to me
And I hope that you’re still out there and you’re like you used to be
We’ll have ourselves a time
And we’ll dance ’til the morning sun
And we’ll let the good times come in
And we won’t stop ’til we’re done
Not that any of that matters. Back in the High Life moves from one well-crafted song to the next, regardless of the motivation that spurred the writing … or whatever the meaning is behind the lyrics, it’s still a great album.
If benign, and unproven, religious undertones put you off … there’s always the new Witch Taint album.
Back in the High Life, produced by Russ Titelman (Eric Clapton, Little Feat, The Allman Brothers, et al) captures the auditory zeitgeist of the 1980’s — BIG drum sounds & drum machines, keyboards, layers upon layers of guitars, horns, perfect timing, and perfect sound … and loads and loads and LOADS of backing vocals — all of which were de rigueur in the mid-80s.
Steve Winwood’s voice was the most perfect instrument of all, not surprisingly.
An argument could be made that the album is a bit boated with its +/- 30 different musicians and backing vocalists and 18 separate engineers. But all artists ran into this kind of gluttony during that time. Listen to Eric Clapton’s Journeyman album (also produced by Titelman), Peter Gabriel’s So, or Bob Seger’s “Shakedown” from the Beverly Hills Cop II soundtrack (only So has weathered the years).
Truthfully, everything about the ’80s was bloated, so this is par for the course.
In addition to being a smash hit, critics heaped loads of praise on the album.
Timothy White in Rolling Stone wrote: “With Back in the High Life, Steve Winwood has created the first undeniably superb record of an almost decade-long solo career.”
Karyn Albano of the website Classic Rock Reviews said: “the album achieves that elusive goal of combining great songs that will stand the test of time while also catering to the commercial appeal of the day.”
Robert Christgau, the Dean of American Rock Critics, gave the album a C and said: “This is the fate of a wunderkind with more talent than brains … So he’s confident that the veracity and unpretentiousness of his well-wrought banalities make them interesting, …” — [it’s becoming evident that Mr. Christgau and I have wildly different tastes]
While the sheen of the album means that a large chunk of Winwood’s soulful voice, while not erased, gets washed out by the sterility of the production.
But the trade-off is an album like Back in the High Life — an album that’s so good it promises to be played in doctors’ offices until the rapture.