The 1996 album George Michael called his greatest work: “The best in my life”
By the mid-1980s, George Michael had become a much different man than the person who started WHAM back in the day.
He didn’t want to be known as a teenybopper idol for the rest of his life, and while the dissolution of his band was tragic for fans, it wasn’t like he was falling out with Andrew Ridgely in any way. He just wanted the chance to work with a different template whenever he performed, and once he stormed onto the scene in 1987, people started to realise just what kind of artist that they had been looking at all of those years.
There was no doubt that Michael had a soulful voice to start out with, but Faith was the first time that people actually seemed to pay attention to what he had to say. Every concerned mother would have pulled their daughter away from the television screen if they knew that the same kid who sang ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ was making tunes like ‘I Want Your Sex’, but Michael didn’t want to be the risque artist that everyone was billing him as, either.
His debut was simply a line in the sand that showed everyone what he could do in a pop context, and while Listen Without Prejudice Vol 1 was a step in the right direction, the fact that it didn’t resonate as much with fans was the real tragedy. He was giving everyone a crash course in the kinds of songs that he first fell in love with, and even if he wore his influences from The Beatles to Stevie Wonder on his sleeve a little too much, you could tell that he was working on something more impressive in the background.
He wanted the chance for people to see the true man underneath it all, but he probably didn’t expect to pay for it with the loss of one of his dearest partners. Despite not having come out of the closet yet, losing his partner, Anselmo Feleppa, isn’t something that he could have sidestepped in his music. That relationship was too important to him, and Older is the first time that Michael left no barrier between himself and the audience.
The tabloids could speculate about him all they wanted, but when looking through his lyrics, Michael was being as vulnerable as he could with his audience. The songs were a lot more downtempo than before, but even for a record that didn’t have the same knockout hits that he did in the 1980s, Michael could confidently say that the record had some of the finest music that he had ever made.
He wasn’t in the market for hits at this time, but even if he didn’t feel like making a traditional pop album, he could still rest easy knowing that he had made his masterpiece, saying, “I think the whole experience of losing Anselmo, the period of grief, which was roughly two years that I didn’t write a note of music. And then, the absolute knowledge that the next album I was going to write would be about grief and recovery.”
Adding, “Older is my greatest moment, in my opinion. I wrote Older within about I suppose eight months… I think I wrote the best, most healing piece of music that I’ve ever written in my life with that album.”
But that kind of grief wasn’t the kind of thing that any of his fans wanted him to capture again. He didn’t deserve to spend the rest of his life writing heartbroken songs every single time he sang, and even though he did share a lot of his frustration with the world on some of his later works like ‘Shoot the Dog’, he was still willing to make music that had a lot more hope behind it after the fact.
Older isn’t necessarily one of the most complex records ever made by any stretch, but when you listen through every song, you can tell that Michael wanted this album to be his equivalent of a record like Joni Mitchell’s Blue. The lines were ripped directly from his broken heart, and even if he didn’t have the best time making it, music was always going to be the one constant that could heal his broken heart.
