The 1990s album Phil Collins called the best he ever made: “I just am so proud”
Considering how much people dealt with Phil Collins in the 1980s, it’s no surprise that he even got tired of himself after a while.
You can’t judge someone like him for being a workaholic whenever he played, but when looking through his discography, there came a point where people had a little too much ‘Sussudio’ in their lives to really justify him being one of the biggest stars in the world for too long. But right when his popularity started to wane was when Collins put together some of the best albums of his career.
Then again, it’s hard to really look at Collins’s career without focusing on Genesis. Even though anyone who made ‘In the Air Tonight’ was well within their rights to leave their old band behind, Collins wasn’t about to split the whole thing up for the hell of it. He wanted the chance to have a few pop hits with his old mates, and while ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ was storming up the charts, it wasn’t out of the question for him to make some hits on albums like Invisible Touch, either.
But judging from his solo career alone, No Jacket Required was always going to be the peak of his solo years. He had some of the biggest hits that he could have hoped for, and while But Seriously did have more than its fair share of classics on it, the serious tone of a song like ‘Another Day in Paradise’ wasn’t going to be nearly as captivating as the party songs that he was becoming known for.
He didn’t want to be put in that box, though. He had the potential to make heartbreaking ballads and the occasional fantastic rock and roll tune, but anything that he wrote needed to come from his heart first before anything else. So when going through his second divorce, Collins knew that he needed to peel things back and write songs that were a bit more introspective than what he could have done with his bandmates.
And it’s not like Both Sides is sugarcoating anything, either. Nothing about the traditional Collins sound has changed by any means, but when looking through the lyrics, this is like his version of Blood on the Tracks. He had a lot to unpack on every one of these songs, and while bringing in the right people to tighten things up would have helped, he knew that he needed to bring a more personal touch to every song.
Having played all of the instruments himself, Collins felt that the album stood out as the most authentic album in his solo catalogue, saying, “It did fall through the cracks. I mean, it sold well, but it didn’t sell as well as the one before it. But I just am so proud of that record. It’s my favourite album. Some of those songs, I played [them] once or twice, and when I sang it, I didn’t write the words down, I just sang them. It just comes out of you. I’m very proud of that record.”
Anyone else would have killed to have that kind of improvisational power, but Collins was never trying to make the best words for a pop hit, either. A lot of the songs aren’t even pop song length or would have needed to go through a radio edit, but when tackling a subject like a divorce, Collins was never going to cut down what he was feeling, no matter how much his higher-ups might have wanted a more air-tight record.
He needed the chance to let all of his emotion out, and since he had spent years trying to make the biggest pop songs for himself, Genesis, and even people like Eric Clapton, this was the moment where Collins finally forgot about all those things. What mattered was being able to quote his own heart, and as long as he made the statement he wanted to, that was better than any kind of gold record.
