How did George Michael want to be remembered?
There’s no getting around that voice whenever you listen to a George Michael record.
While he didn’t get into the music industry thinking that he was going to be one of the biggest names in music, his massive range was still one of the greatest instruments that the 1980s ever produced, especially when he started working on more R&B-influenced tunes towards the tail end of his career. Then again, Michael was always looking at his career a little differently than everyone else when he first began his career.
But if you looked at the very beginning of Michael’s career, you’d be forgiven for thinking that he was just doing everything for a laugh. He and Andrew Ridgely weren’t meant to be the most talented musicians in the world when they started cutting their first dance tracks or anything, but when you listen to Make It Big, Michael was already branching out. He needed a better outlet than his childhood band, and when Faith came out, people realised that they were dealing with a vocal powerhouse.
And that last word isn’t something you should take lightly. When you think of the greatest rock and roll voices of all time, Michael could have gone toe-to-toe with any of them, and even though he didn’t see himself as a true rock and roll artist by any means, the fact that he could hold his own and leave everyone absolutely stunned when performing ‘Somebody to Love’ with Queen, no one was going to call his singing into question ever again.
Compared to everyone else, though, Michael said that he felt much more comfortable being a songwriter first and a singer second, saying, “I believe I am much more of a writer than I am anything else. From the first album, I didn’t think I would make a decent singer although I had belief as a writer. I think at the end of the day, I don’t believe I am important as a pop star. I don’t believe I will make a great mark as an entity. Most of us want to leave something that will be remembered without people having to search in their memory. I want to leave songs that will mean something to other generations.”
Even if he didn’t consider himself a singer then, you can definitely hear his vocal evolution throughout every one of his albums. He wanted the chance to prove himself as a writer first, but being able to hold his own next to someone like Aretha Franklin and getting praise from people like Elton John isn’t exactly an accident. He knew the instrument he had to work with, and by the time of working on tunes like ‘One More Try’, he was working on some of the best vocal leaps he ever attempted.
Then again, it’s easy to look at the bands that he covered and see the artists that he wanted to go down in history with. He was writing a lot of his biggest tunes in tribute to John Lennon and Paul McCartney during Listen Without Prejudice Pt. 1, and even when looking at the different people that he covered, it takes a certain talent to be able to do justice to a song like ‘Edith and the Kingpin’ the way that he does.
And given how early he won his accolades in the 1980s, he was going to make every one of them count on his later records. It’s impossible to believe that a song like ‘Father Figure’ could come fully formed in one person’s head, but even if the session musicians added a lot to his songs, they would have been just as captivating if all Michael had to work with was his voice and a single piano half of the time.
Which is probably why he’s more remembered for the individual moments and ended up leaving show business altogether towards the end of his career. He didn’t need his life to turn into a media circus every time he performed, and it made sense for him to do whatever he could to have people remember those beautiful melodies before anything else.
