Now Let us Talk about Steve Winwood.

Few recording artists give me as much enjoyment and reservations as Steve Winwood. I've seen him once live, on tour with Steely Dan when Becker was still around. (It was actually one of the "free" shows that were part of Ticketmaster's class action settlement.) I went mainly for Steely Dan but Winwood's opening set stole the show. I was shocked at how little his voice had aged - even "Gimme Some Lovin'" was barely distinguishable from his original teenage vocal. He went from instrument to instrument, performing all of them masterfully and effortlessly, and he did all of his best numbers too. The highlight was his extended guitar solo on "Dear Mr. Fantasy." But it says a lot that almost everything was drawn from the '60s.

By the time we get to the '80s, Xgau is calling Winwood a "wunderkind with more talent than brains." I wouldn't call it a lack of "brains," but I knew this era first before Traffic et al, and I got the impression that if Winwood wasn't so gifted, he would have easily and quickly walked away into a regular office job without having much doubt. He just seemed to be missing something that drove most great artists - it's not the same for everyone, but it usually makes it easy to see why they became artists and why they had to create the work they made.

Some of the hits like "Higher Love," "Back in the High Life" and "Finer Things" still feel palatable to me because talent aside, he sounds like a regular guy getting older, at peace with life and articulating that clearly without too much pretension. It's not the most interesting stuff but it is comforting, like running into one of my parents' friends (or a school friend's parent) and seeing them in a happy place.

I got the impression that if Winwood wasn't so gifted, he would have easily and quickly walked away into a regular office job without having much doubt.

Interesting comment, given what he says in this 1988 interview:

“(After leaving Traffic,) I started deliberately mixing with people who had nothing to do with music or any of the arts,” he says. “You know, there was an idea in the Sixties that people who complied to rules, or who went to work at nine and came home at five and wore suits, that they were wrong. I suddenly began to realize ‘What’s wrong with working from nine till five? That’s great.’ And I started to do that myself a bit then.” (…)

(On punk rock:) “It was against everything that I had been or was to that point,” he says bluntly. “It was against music, too. It was antiestablishment. They were really just advanced hippies. I’d been through that antiestablishment thing in the late Sixties, and during the Seventies I suddenly realized the value of being establishment.”

HA! I guess it establishes the Roman Hruska argument for Steve Winwood...there are lot of people who go along with the establishment. They are entitled to a little representation in Steve Winwood, aren't they? We can't have all Sex Pistols, Clash and Ramones.

I'm not a Winwood fan at all, but I don't take Xgau seriously when it comes to attitudes about certain boomers.

I certainly like Traffic/Winwood more than Christgau does, but I understand the attitude that his music and singing can seem facile. As birdistheword says, there's the impression that the music is there for its own sake, he has no message but doesn't seem ego-driven either.
In a way, though, when his songs are exciting or emotional, it can be more valuable than with other artists simply because those feelings arise from the writing, playing and singing themselves. It helped having Jim Capaldi write words for him to give the songs a focus.
I read the 1988 Winwood biography in high school, and probably remember more anecdotes about his bandmates than about him.

I listened to the '87 remix of "Valerie" a few minutes -- my god, talk about shoehorning music to fit the scansion. Never mind that the lyrics make no sense, period; but Winwood stresses the following lines in the first post-chorus verse in weird ways: "Not how lovers cry out/Just like they're dying." They don't work.

The Eric Prydz remix did much to reduce Will Jennings to Bernie Taupin.

I suppose the Traffic-era songs were loose/slow-paced enough that Winwood had a lot more leeway to bend the phrasing of clumsy lyrics.