Steve Winwood Back in the High Life (1986)

From ultimateclassicrock.com

Classic rock is about heavy hooks, power chords and tight harmonies. But it’s also about letting loose and enjoying the good times. And there’s no better time for that than Friday evening, when we pick up our paycheck, punch out of work and enjoy a couple days of much-needed rest and relaxation.

One of the messed-up things about those good times is that we often don’t appreciate how special they are until they’re gone — something that tends to weigh on us more as we get older, and we begin to understand just how fleeting everything is and how quickly time passes, no matter how we might try to slow it down. Ironically, many of us spend our youth wishing things would speed up, trying to wave away whatever’s in front of us so we can hurry on to the next in a seemingly limitless series of adventures.

It happens to all of us, and there’s no getting around it, so there’s no point in being maudlin about it — something Steve Winwood understood well in 1985 and ’86, when he was putting together the tracks for what would become his fourth solo album, ‘Back in the High Life.’ Although he was only 38 at the time, Winwood was nearing a quarter century as a professional musician, and his career had already been through plenty of ups and downs. More than most, he knew that they were cyclical, and when things are low, you just have to wait for them to pick up again.

Even though he had no way of knowing it at the time, ‘High Life’ was positioning Winwood for one of the biggest high points of his career and a Grammy-winning comeback that returned him to the charts in a big way after a relatively fallow period following the middling success of 1982’s ‘Talking Back to the Night’ album. Like on its predecessor, 1980’s much more popular ‘Arc of a Diver,’ Winwood performed most of the instruments himself on ‘Night,’ recording at his home studio — a setup that, while certainly convenient, eventually proved a bit stifling and led to a major change in location, from the U.K. to New York.

“I went to New York simply to get the juices flowing again,” he recalled later. “I was in danger of becoming arty in isolation and really missed playing with other musicians. I was spending all my time reading computer manuals and tapping on keyboards rather than getting out and entertaining, which is my job.”

To that end, ‘High Life’ features a slew of musicians, from session ringers like Jimmy Bralower and John Robinson to famous names like Joe Walsh, James Taylor and Chaka Khan. The resulting production, while definitely slick enough for mid-’80s radio playlists, was more expansive and varied than Winwood’s recent solo efforts. Case in point: the title track, which employed a chiming mandolin in the lead and rested on a droning accordion in the background — one of the only times either instrument would appear in the Top 40 during the decade.

But ‘Back in the High Life Again’ almost didn’t make the record. As Winwood’s co-writer, Will Jennings, later told Songfacts, “I called one day and talked to Russ Titelman, who was producing the album. They were doing it in New York. I asked him how it was going, and he said, ‘Oh it’s going great.’ He said ‘Higher Love’ came out great and ‘The Finer Things.’ I asked him how ‘Back in the High Life’ would come out. There was this little pause, and he said, ‘Steve hasn’t shown me that song.'”

According to Jennings, he’d originally left the lyrics with Winwood during a writing session in 1984, but for whatever reason, Winwood had never gotten around to putting together music for them. As it turned out, fate was simply waiting to intervene. “At that time, [Winwood] was going through a divorce,” Jennings explained. “And because of the divorce, his wife got everything in the house, this big house in England. So he came up from London and went out to this house — which he still lives in and he had for years before he was married — and everything was gone, except there was a mandolin over in the corner of the living room. It was winter and it was dreary. He went over and picked up the mandolin, and he already had the words in his head. And that’s when he wrote the melody.”

That melody would go on to anchor a Top 20 hit for Winwood — one of four from the album, which sparked a revival in his solo career that continued into the ’90s. And although his brand of cleanly produced blue-eyed soul would quickly become synonymous with beer commercials and adult-contemporary radio, the emotions that fueled ‘Back in the High Life Again’ remain as resonant as ever. (Check out Warren Zevon’s stripped-down cover for proof.)

“‘Back in the High Life’ was not written to predict what I would be doing but because of what I actually was doing,” Winwood later mused. “I knew that ‘Back in the High Life’ was going to be my last album on my contract, and I had thought for a long time about going into production and stuff. I finally decided, ‘No, I might as well pursue my career as a solo artist and put everything into it.’ I guess I probably had never put everything into it, because I’d always felt that I was above being an entertainer.”

So if you’re in need of a little high life as this weekend approaches, never fear; like Steve Winwood says in the song, we’ll all get back there eventually. But you don’t need to wait to hear that plaintive mandolin — just scroll up to the video above, hit play, turn up the volume and let the weekend start … now.

Steve Winwood Back in the High Life (1986)

From classicrockreview.com

Steve Winwood is an artist who has had two major phases of his professional career. Starting as a teenager with the Spencer Davis Group, he was thrust into the international spotlight with a pair of mega-hits “Gimme Some Lovin’” and “I’m a Man”. This kicked off the first phase of his career playing and fronting several progressive rock bands including Blind Faith and, more prominently, Traffic throughout the late sixties and early seventies.

Then, in the 1980s, Winwood came back with the second phase of his career which was more distinctly pop and blue-eyed soul. He scored some minor hits from the albums Arc of a Diver in 1980 and Talking Back to the Night in 1982. These albums set the stage for the most successful album of his career – 1986’s Back In the High Life. Here, Winwood took some of the styles and methods that he had developed on the previous two albums and brought it to a whole new level.

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. As we mentioned earlier in other reviews, this was no easy task in 1986 when the prevailing pop “sound” was at a nadir. Winwood and co-producer Russ Titelman sacrificed nothing here. The entire album managed to encompass the sounds of the eighties, as it uses its share of synthesizers and modern fonts without sounding dated. This was achieved by counter-balancing the “80’s” sounds with some traditional instruments, styles and Winwood’s distinctive and emotive vocals. There is also excellent songwriting, with most songs co-written by Winwood and Will Jennings and all including some cool lyrics and catchy melodies.

1986 is the third year overall that this new 2011 enterprise called Classic Rock Review has examined, the first two were 1971 and 1981. It may seem like we choose these years at random, there is a method to our madness as we choose to review years with significant anniversaries (that is anniversaries divisible by ‘5’), and it is the 25th anniversary of the music of 1986. With each of these review years, we choose an Album of the Year to review last, and for 1986 that album is Back In the High Life.

For a pop-oriented album, Back In the High Life is unique. Each of its eight tracks exceed five minutes in length which is something not seen much outside of prog rock, art rock, or dance tracks. This may be a further testament to the thought and effort put into these compositions. The album also contains some cameo appearances by popular contemporaries, diversely spread throughout.

The album kicks off with the song which would become Winwood’s only #1 hit of his long career, “Higher Love”. This nicely sets the pace for what we’ll expect from the rest of the album – Caribbean rhythms with synth, horns, funky bass, and the distinctive, upper-range vocals. This song is awash in good feelings; “Let me feel that love come over you…”, almost a gospel-like song, and it features soul star Chaka Kahn singing high background harmonies.

On the other end, the album concludes with a couple of interesting songs with very different co-writers. “Split Decision” was co-written by the legendary Joe Walsh and begins with a distinctive, crunchy riff from Walsh and then smoothly works towards a more Winwood-centric riff with organ and reggae beat in the verse and a soul-influenced chorus. The lyric is another take on the influences of good and evil on a person;

“One man puts the fire out, the other lights the fuse…”

“My Love’s Leavin’” was co-written by British eccentric artist Vivian Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, and contains stark soundscapes which are ethereal and haunting, about facing reality and singing of hope and faith in the face of a loss.

“Freedom Overspill” contains some rewarding instrumentation with an edgy, whining guitar providing some of the best licks on the album above a masterful arrangement of synths, organ, horns, and rhythm. It is very funky and very eighties, but somehow it is not a caricature. The lyrics paint a picture of a couple up all night hashing out their differences – “Coffee and tears the whole night through/Burning up on midnight oil/And it’s come right back on you”.

“The Finer Things” was another radio hit from the album, with its misty opening, bouncing, Police-like rhythms, and lots of changes throughout. The song rolls along like the river, at some points calm and serene while at others rough and tumbling rapids. This metaphor is explicit in the lyrics;

“So time is a river rolling into nowhere, I will live while I can I will have my ever after…” 

“Wake Me Up On Judgment Day” is a song about wanting to avoid struggle – to get to the good stuff without all of the pitfalls – “Give me life where nothing fails, not a dream in a wishing well”. The song kicks in like a sunrise, the burst of light then explodes from the dawn. Ironically, this song talks of “horns” but actual “horns” are used sparingly with a heavy bass line and much percussion.

But the single element that makes Back In the High Life a truly great album is the title song “Back In the High Life Again”. According to co-writer Jennings, the song was one that Winwood seemed to have little interest in developing when recording began on the album. Until one winter day Winwood returned to his mansion after his divorce to find everything gone except for a mandolin in the corner of the living room. Jennings said, “He went over and picked up the mandolin, and he already had the words in his head, and that’s when he wrote the melody.” The recording of this song for the album includes a lead mandolin along several other ethnic instruments such as acoustic guitar, accordion, bagpipes, and marching drums, with guest James Taylor on backing vocals. This is all as a backdrop for the excellent vocal melody by Winwood, which portrays the feeling of hope and optimism.

The song was later covered by Warren Zevon, whose bare-bones, emotional delivery has an entirely different mood from Winwood’s original release, mournful and melancholy, almost satirical. This despite the fact that Zevon did not change the key or melody for his recording. Perhaps the truest test for a quality song is when it can have several interpretations and “faces”, depending on its delivery, and “Back In the High Life Again” is truly a great song.

Back In the High Life was the final album Winwood would do for Island Records, a label he had been with for 21 years at the time of the album’s released in July, 1986. Despite this longevity, Winwood was still relatively young at 38 and he would go on to do more interesting things in the subsequent years; signing with Virgin Records and producing a few more hit albums in the late eighties, reuniting the band Traffic in nineties, and most recently working with former Blind Faith band mate Eric Clapton, with whom he toured in 2011.