“A highlight of my career”: The George Michael song his label forced him to scrap
The enemy to any creative person is corporations trying to get their piece. As much as people like the idea of working with major labels to get their music to the biggest audiences possible, it’s always difficult to keep that reputation in an ever-changing musical landscape, to the point where people find themselves answering to suits that wouldn’t know the first thing about what good music sounds like. And while George Michael had washed his hands of the music business in the years leading up to his passing, he did have some regrets about a handful of songs that were kept behind the vaults.
Because, really, no label should get in the way of artists wanting to release music. There might be a few times where his musical intuition wasn’t the most commercial choice, like making cover albums, but there’s hardly any reason to think that the man behind such classics as ‘Careless Whisper’ and ‘Faith’ wouldn’t be allowed on the radio at any point in his career.
But as much as he represented pop music, Michael wanted to explore something much bigger than the mainstream charts. He was happy to make catchy melodies, but his heart was always in making R&B music, and that came from his years of listening to everyone from Marvin Gaye to Stevie Wonder when he was putting together his first tunes. So when he grew into a seasoned pro, he wanted to explore that same kind of sound on his own tunes.
After all, Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 already had the makings of a great R&B album, and Older took some of that downtempo material into even more adventurous territories, but Michael was simply trying to emulate Wonder. He wanted to have an avenue to work with people like Mary J Blige if the time called for it.
Despite Blige being far more interested in soul music than Michael’s material, it’s easy to see them fitting well together. Blige always had a certain gospel flair to her voice whenever she sang, so the news of them working together on the Stevie Wonder tune ‘As’ was too perfect. It was bound to be a duet for the ages; it was a duet that felt like the perfect combination, and it’s also a duet that his label never wanted to release.
Considering Michael was going through his infamous sex scandals at the time, the label halted any release of the song until it eventually turned up on a handful of his compilations, with Michael saying later, “That was the worst consequence about this. It’s a fantastic duet, a highlight of my career. [The label president] told Sony’s lawyer, ‘What’s in it for her? He’s coming off the back of a sex scandal.’ Maybe he feared the R&B community’s reaction.”
Whether or not he was being hit with various sexual allegations hardly took away from the song itself. From start to finish, the chemistry is definitely there, and while most earthly musicians can’t hope to be nearly as talented as Wonder, both of them do a respectable job of taking the original Songs in the Key of Life track and turning it into one of the smoothest slices of R&B to have ever come out of the 1990s.
Then again, sometimes it’s better to have some of the best tracks be hidden gems that the fans have to seek out. Most people would have probably been happy if it were released on a proper album, but the audience willing to do some digging was rewarded once they got their hands on this tune.
