Look inside your heart, I'll look inside mine

March 22, 2018 5:53 PM

Steve Winwood's 1986 album Back In The High Life [full album, 45m] is one of those rare albums (in a family perhaps with Rumours) where every track is basically perfect (if you like this sort of thing). It won 3 Grammys, hit the top 20 (or higher) in 10 countries, and even hit slot 46 on the US R&B Hip-Hop Album chart. Side A>: Higher Love [video, DM link], Take It As It Comes, Freedom Overspill, Back In The High Life Again [video]

Side B: The Finer Things [video], Wake Me Up On Judgement Day, Split Decision, My Love's Leavin'

posted by hippybear (42 comments total)

So "Valerie" isn't on this album, I wouldn't have guessed that.
posted by Chrysostom at 6:05 PM on March 22, 2018 [3 favorites]

Saw him in on the tour for this album at Eisenhower Auditorium at Penn State. One of my favorite concerts ever.
posted by octothorpe at 6:05 PM on March 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

Fascinating. I worked at a boomer-oriented coffee shop in a college town starting in 1986, and we had several tapes featuring Winwood as a vocalist, including this album, the first Traffic and Blind Faith records, and more. I was generically opposed to these tapes, as a punk rock person, and would not play them unless directed to.

Over time, they actually won me over.

Until this very moment, I had lived my life thinking that Back in the High Life was originally released in like 1975.
posted by mwhybark at 6:09 PM on March 22, 2018 [2 favorites]

Needs the Michelob tag.
posted by vrakatar at 6:09 PM on March 22, 2018 [3 favorites]

listening to it now, I have no idea how I thought that - maybe I thought this was actually by Peter Gabriel? I think, actually, that that is actually correct. Far out.
posted by mwhybark at 6:14 PM on March 22, 2018

My fave of Winwood's is "While you see a chance." I think it came out in 1980 or 81.
posted by bz at 6:16 PM on March 22, 2018 [12 favorites]

My Love’s Leavin’ is part of the soundtrack of my 20th summer. I hear it today and am instantly transported back to that time. Nice bittersweet memories. . .
posted by bookmammal at 6:23 PM on March 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

Higher Love is a song that instantly, immediately and completely takes me back to a place and time that I feel like I could step right into, like walking into an elevator, and the doors could close behind me and I'd just inhabit it all over again without missing a beat. It's that specific and ingrained.
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 6:25 PM on March 22, 2018 [12 favorites]

hippybear: "Surely you mean Miller. They make High Life."

You don't remember Winwood's Michelob commercial?
posted by octothorpe at 6:26 PM on March 22, 2018 [2 favorites]

Jinx! Winwood is clearly the composer of life soundtracks.
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 6:26 PM on March 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

I’ve got a bit of a weak spot for ‘80s Steve Winwood...I wore this tape out back in the day and have a vinyl copy now that I throw on when I’m feeling nostalgic. Valerie is still his best solo song (some of his stuff with the Spencer Davis Group and Traffic is fantastic), but as noted earlier in the thread, not on this album.
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:26 PM on March 22, 2018

I worked at a store in the mall in 1987.
posted by rhizome at 6:40 PM on March 22, 2018 [3 favorites]

A favorite from Winwood, from an earlier era..."Can't Find My Way Home," just Winwood and a guitar in front of a crackling fire. It's the first time I heard this song.

And a second Winwood song, this time sung by Warren Zevon, bless his soul..."Back in the High Life Again."
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:40 PM on March 22, 2018 [8 favorites]

Had it on cassette! It is right up there with Rumors.
posted by tuesdayschild at 6:48 PM on March 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'm partial to Arc of a Diver, but love about everything Winwood's ever done—including I'm a Man, recorded at the tender age of 19.

Thanks for another reminder of music I don't listen to enough these days. I have my playlist for the rest of the evening.
posted by she's not there at 6:55 PM on March 22, 2018 [3 favorites]

Gimme, gimme some lovin'
posted by Mental Wimp at 7:15 PM on March 22, 2018 [3 favorites]

This was one of my favorites when I was a kid. I just put on Higher Love in the car with my three-year-old, who decided it's called "High and Low", which would be a great Sesame Street version.

Btw, the first Steve Winwood solo album (just called Steve Winwood) is great. "Hold On" and "Time is Running Out (yt)" have a really unique sound, as well produced as High Life but a lot more analog.
posted by condour75 at 7:15 PM on March 22, 2018

I seem to recall Steve Windwood saying that the drum intro to Higher Love was something Chaka Khan's drummer just came up with in the studio and they liked it so much they arranged the song around it.. Or something to that effect...
posted by Bartonius at 7:19 PM on March 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

"Bring me a Hi-Ho love!"

Loved his Spencer Davis Group work. Loved his work with Traffic and most all of his solo work, too.

Back in the High Life marked my own return to said life, meeting my future and final wife after a nasty divorce. My Love's Leavin' was especially poignant, and Higher Love hit me in right where it feels good.

Kinda love this spooky song: The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys

Also, note that dude was only 15 when he was singing for Spencer Davis Group.
posted by Mental Wimp at 7:26 PM on March 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

I myself am partial to "Arc of a Diver", but I do truly love all of Winwood's work. "Low Spark..." is another album that I love start to finish. Thanks hippybear for these frequent trips back to the attics of my life.
posted by sundrop at 7:35 PM on March 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

I played "The Finer Things" as the musical coda for a chapel talk I gave in high school, and it fit perfectly at the time. I was very fond of this album, which was not a given as my favorite bands at the time were Depeche Mode and New Order.
posted by jscalzi at 7:52 PM on March 22, 2018 [2 favorites]

I'm joyfully resisting the urge to sing with my eyes closed . . . while at work. In 1986, I was living alone for the first time in a tiny flat in Lincoln Park in Chicago. One of those old low, brick U-shaped buildings with no air-conditioning and barely a cross breeze. I'm lounging on the shared back porch with my neighbors and we're chain-smoking and drinking anything with an ice cube in it. thank you for posting this.
posted by lemon_icing at 7:55 PM on March 22, 2018 [4 favorites]

A great detail in “Greenberg” is that Ben Stiller was wearing a Back in the High Life T-shirt
posted by Clustercuss at 8:08 PM on March 22, 2018

This led me down a Youtube rabbit hole that ended up with this Valerie cover that is too insane/awesome to not pass along.
posted by lubujackson at 9:07 PM on March 22, 2018

Ah, fifteen-year-old me. Hello. ...I thought there was something poignant about "High Life" - something about it felt like he was never going to make it "back in the high life again", and it was just wishful thinking. I don't know why I was so bleak.

....I also quite liked Roll With It, on the following album.

(Hippybear: If you're taking requests, how about Steely Dan's Aja?)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:20 PM on March 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

I feel like I'm becoming the guy who makes every other one of his MeFi comments about his dead mom, so I apologize for dropping yet another moment here, but my mom had a twin sister. My aunt, obviously. She was my idol growing up, because she lived a free bohemian single life in San Francisco (back when such a thing was still possible) and I was a pudgy introverted queer kid in Cornfield, Illinois. She loved Steve Winwood especially, and I remember playing her copies of Arc of a Diver and Talking Back to the Night when we'd spend occasional summers out there with her.

After the big quake in '89, she lost everything - her job, her home, the works - and had to move in with us in the Midwest. "Back in the High Life Again" became a kind of personal anthem, a redemption song that kept her looking forward to the day when she'd be able to return to her beloved city and her old way of life. We all wanted that for her, none more than me. I thought I'd live the lyrics of that song with her someday, me as the eventual young adult barhopping with her along the Embarcadero, both of us so carefree at last. But for a multitude of reasons, she never managed.*

I still love the hopefulness of the title track, even if now, in my own encroaching middle age, I can only hear it sung as through someone who knows he most likely won't get back to that life again. The song lives in that hovering space between the wish and the outcome of the wish, the gorgeous vista in the distance just beyond a far curve you won't be going around for a while yet. Like the young EmpressCallipygos, I guess I'm just permanently tapped into the melancholy of it now. But it is a beautiful vision, even so.

* When she died, she left me her car and a little insurance money. The first thing I did was move to San Francisco.
posted by mykescipark at 10:50 PM on March 22, 2018 [11 favorites]

Please enjoy this utterly sublime live performance of Higher Love by Whitney, who originally recorded it for I'm Your Baby Tonight.

And today I learned that Winwood's original had Chaka Khan on backing vocals and Nile Rogers on guitar!
posted by Gin and Broadband at 2:38 AM on March 23, 2018

Nile Rodgers seemed to be on every album in the '80s. Looking at his All-Music page, he's got 2700 credits so he really was everywhere.
posted by octothorpe at 4:30 AM on March 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

Great concert video of Traffic playing Dear Mr. Fantasy showing off Winwood's blistering lead guitar chops (even if he looks disconcertingly like Neil from The Young Ones)

Here he is with Blind Faith and Sea of Joy (the guitar player in that band was pretty good too)
posted by octothorpe at 4:43 AM on March 23, 2018

Nile Rodgers seemed to be on every album in the '80s. Looking at his All-Music page, he's got 2700 credits so he really was everywhere.

He said that someone has calculated that his trademark Stratocaster, "the hitmaker", has been played on songs that sold a billion dollars......that's a long way from the touring Sesame Street show band!
posted by thelonius at 5:00 AM on March 23, 2018

> thelonius:
"that's a long way from the touring Sesame Street show band!"

It's actually just closing a circle.
posted by chavenet at 5:18 AM on March 23, 2018

It's actually just closing a circle

The circle-closing trivia is this: Bowie guitarist Carlos Alomar was also in that Sesame Street band; that's where he and Rodgers worked together before Let's Dance
posted by thelonius at 5:45 AM on March 23, 2018 [2 favorites]

I am required by law to point out that the drummer on the title track (and others) is John JR Robinson, one of the great studio musicians of that era. He's also the drummer on Michael Jackson's "Rock with You" (and many, many other famous tracks, but my favorite is "Rock with You").
posted by crLLC at 6:45 AM on March 23, 2018 [2 favorites]

My fave of Winwood's is "While you see a chance." I think it came out in 1980 or 81.


For reasons unknown, I always conflated "While You See a Chance" with "Baker Street."

.I also quite liked Roll With It on the following album

I've unofficially adopted this as a paraplegic anthem.
posted by DrAstroZoom at 7:49 AM on March 23, 2018 [2 favorites]

Having been a huge fan of Winwood's previous lives in Traffic and Blind Faith, his 80s solo albums were kind of disappointing. It seemed a huge departure from Traffic's trippy extended jam progressiveness to this tight, poppy yacht-rock. I'm coming around to liking these albums more lately, but more out of nostalgia for the era than anything else.
posted by rocket88 at 8:19 AM on March 23, 2018

Yeah, I bought this album, back in the day, and still have the vinyl around...but never really grew to love it. Compared to the highs of Traffic, this just seemed like Winwood's bid for middle of the road, adult contemporary stardom. (I mean, more power to him for having that option, his talent was / is really immense, but it was not my jam.)

I don't have a monopoly on making music album posts.
I'm soooo tempted; you guys realize Roxy Music's first album came out about 46 years ago this past February; an album that will always be 10 years outside of our current timestream. (Not to be all PepsiBlue or anything...)
posted by Bron at 8:38 AM on March 23, 2018 [2 favorites]

So, summer of 1986. I was 14, just finished freshman year, nothing to do, parents on my ass, generally unhappy with life. I turned 15 at the end of June, and on my birthday, walked into the local country club and got a job as a dishwasher. I worked for 3 hours that day, earning the princely sum of $10.50 plus all the buffet food I could eat.

I started picking up shifts. I liked the job: buffet and dinner prep, setting up the dining room, cleaning anything and everything, eating, etc. It was night and day from anything I'd ever lived before: there was work to be done, and as long as it got done, nobody fucked with me, nobody bullied me, nobody belittled me. I wasn't treated like a kid, everybody treated me like a person and a coworker. At school, I was always on the defensive, never knowing where the next attack would come from, never having any allies. At work, it was all of us against the clock. Those people were decent and kind to me, and when I fucked up, I was told IMMEDIATELY how to fix it, and then things were cool.

A month later, I went to two weeks of nerd camp. It was held at RIT, and I stayed on campus and attended classes in robotics and math. Two weeks! Not having to listen to my parents bitch about how I wasn't living up to their expectations! Being around other kids with common interests! Who also didn't bully me or fuck with me for sport! I ate in the dining hall, and I walked from the dorm to classrooms, and spent time playing video games and pool, and ran around with friends. Also I got laid. My mom told me she wanted me to call her every night, and I was like, but I'm having fun and talking to you is a real drag, so I'll just "forget" to call until Saturday, and when I called, the first thing she did was lay into me for not calling, and I remember holding the phone away from my ear and realizing, there's going to be a time in my life when I don't have to listen to this ever again, and the relief at that realization was indescribable.

After camp, I went back to my normal life, working as much as I could. Every hour at work was an hour not at home, and $3.50/h was enough to be able to go to the mall or whatever other stupid teenage things I was doing. And as gross as the job was, it was real work, I felt directly valued (like the following year when I'd work the prom? yeah, bitches, that's MY FOOD you're eating, you're welcome), and I was learning actual skills that would directly come into play a few years down the road. I'd ride my bike to work, get hella grubby, work until 10 P.M. or later (including one memorable Saturday night which had us there until 1:38 A.M.), and go "home". I still didn't feel like I was really a part of my family, but for the first time in my life, I felt like I was okay just being myself. I could sleep at night.

That summer had so many repercussions. I fell into a default relationship with my girlfriend from camp, and I didn't treat her right at all. I would wind up bailing on even going to college; after my senior year, I was totally burned out from school, and I needed a break, so I leveraged my network to land a decent full time cook position at another local restaurant, and wound up working in foodservice for three years. I'd eventually go back to college for engineering, and after graduation follow a path that was heavily informed by my early exposure to technology and theory. I had a lot more learning to do on the woman front, but eventually that first experience with wanting to break up with someone but not knowing what to say would provide me with the tools I needed to fix my marriage.

And that's what Back In the High Life is to me. It's an aural reminder of all those things. I remember being that scared, angry kid, with no agency and no idea of what I had to look forward to, just this thought that "is the rest of my life going to be like this?", and block by block, song by song, the wall came down, the chains were loosened, and then I was outside the cave for the first time in my life.
posted by disconnect at 8:51 AM on March 23, 2018 [6 favorites]

There's something about this record that's always seemed like peak mid-80s to me. Maybe that's a combination of Nile Rodgers + the PPG Wave.

"My Love's Leavin'" was co-written with Winwood's friend Viv Stanshall, ex-Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band member and "Master Of Ceremonies" on Tubular Bells. Also on backup vocals, Jocelyn "I've got the power!" Brown and Dan Hartman, best known for "I Can Dream About You" and for co-writing and producing "Living in America" with James Brown. On 1988's Roll With It Winwood would turn to a Fairlight CMI instead. Despite that, Arc Of A Diver—its eponymous song was also co-written with Stanshall—is still probably my favorite solo Winwood.

(Fun fact: if you watched Solid Gold at Christmas of 1980, you would've seen the dancers perform "While You See a Chance" and "(Just Like) Starting Over.")
posted by octobersurprise at 8:52 AM on March 23, 2018 [3 favorites]

I saw Winwood open for Steely Dan a year or so ago. He put on a great show and definitely still has the chops. I had never seen him before and I guess all the video I have seen he is behind the keyboards but he played guitar on a few songs and I was quite impressed with his skills.
posted by Justin Case at 9:52 AM on March 23, 2018

James Taylor sung background vocals on "Back in the High Life" -- reupping my theory that the lyrics are about a feast where Mona the pig is consumed.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 10:21 AM on March 23, 2018

Better than the original? James Vincent McMorrow sings "Higher Love"
posted by ecourbanist at 11:47 AM on March 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

Trivia: video for "Back in the High Life Again" was filmed in the little town of Manassas hereabouts, with the train station, downtown and notorious NoVa traffic making appearances.
posted by Qex Rodriguez at 5:40 PM on March 23, 2018 [1 favorite]