Steve Winwood: Refugees of the Heart (1990)
Just what I needed: ten framed photos of Steve Winwood. It’s as close as Refugees of the Heart comes to being a work of art. Despite criticism to the contrary, I don’t hear where this is any better or any worse than Roll With It. I’d tell you that Winwood sounds here like he’s on auto cruise, but he always sounds like he’s on auto cruise. You have the pristine arrangements, the warm and emotive mumbling, the sense that you’re hearing a hybrid of Peter Gabriel and Daryl Hall after too many wine coolers. The hit is “One And Only Man,” cowritten with Jim Capaldi and featuring an instrumental workout for Steve. It’s no more and no less ferocious than Eric Clapton’s crossover love songs, which is something of an achievement for Winwood. The remaining songs are ballads (“I Will Be Here”), adult pop songs (“You’ll Keep On Searching”) and slightly funky entries (“Another Deal Goes Down”). The closing “In The Light of Day,” featuring the sort of intoxicating keyboard pattern last seen in “San Jacinto,” brings home the vision of Winwood as a sort of Peter Gabriel lite. Since Winwood arrived in the same place musically as Gabriel at the same time (Back In The High Life and So were both released in 1986), it’s not a question of Winwood following anyone. This is what he does: write love songs that make good use of synthesizers and employ a minimal groove from time to time. Maybe the formula was growing tired. After a string of platinum and multiplatinum albums, Refugees merely went gold. For this reason, Refugees often gets lumped in with the inferior Talking Back To The Night despite being a better record. It’ll find a home with Winwood fans, hits or no hits, simply because soulful adult pop songs like these are at the heart of Winwood’s appeal.
Original LP Version
A1. You’ll Keep On Searching (6:19)
A2. Every Day (Oh Lord) (5:49)
A3. One And Only Man (Steve Winwood/Jim Capaldi) (5:00)
A4. I Will Be Here (5:58)
B1. Another Deal Goes Down (4:57)
B2. Running On (4:18)
B3. Come Out And Dance (5:33)
B4. In The Light of Day (9:44)
All songs written by Steve Winwood and Will Jennings unless noted.
The Players
Steve Winwood (vocals, keyboards, Hammond organ, mini moog solo, keyboard bass, guitar, additional percussion), Larry Byrom (guitar, slide guitar, vibes solo, additional drums, all keyboard & drum programming), Bashiri Johnson (percussion), Michael Rhodes (bass) with Eddie Bayers (drums), Randall Bramblett (saxophone), Jim Capaldi (drums, percussion), Anthony Crawford (guitar), Michael Haynes (trumpet), Jim Horn (alto, baritone & tenor saxophone), Russ Kunkel (drums), Mike Lawler (additional keyboards), Harvey Thomson (additional saxophone). Produced by Steve Winwood; engineered & mixed by Tom Lord Alge; additional engineering by Mick Dolan; executive producer: John Clarke.
The Pictures
Photography by Douglas Brothers. Design by Mike Funk/x height. Art direction by Jeff Ayeroff, Melanie Nissen.
The Plastic
Released on elpee, cassette and compact disc in November 1990 in the UK (Virgin, V/CDV 2560), the US (Virgin, 91405), Germany (Virgin, 86189), Japan (Virgin, VJCP-2803) and Mexico (EMI/Virgin, 4271181) with lyric innersleeve; reached #26 on the UK charts and #27 on the US charts (RIAA-certified gold record).
I picked this album and its predecessor on vinyl as freebies because of winning a radio contest. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have bothered. In retrospect, I wonder why I couldn’t find anything better in the record store.
Worse than “Talking Back in the Night”? It’s not even as good as “Roll with It”, and that one was awful! At least that album had the title track. Here, there’s virtually nothing. First off, the album sounds terrible. Listening through headphones, what dominates is the maddeningly thundering, monotonous snare drum sound which began to come in vogue after drum machines started to get less popular. (Jethro Tull’s “Rock Island” is another crazy making example.). Don’t dare deviate from that click track! Steve tried to bring some authenticity back in by laying off the synths and bringing back the Hammond organ. That didn’t work.
Nothing works if the songs aren’t good. Jennings’ lyrics got worse and worse. Now we’re “Running On” instead of “Holding On”. Now that we’ve got our dancing shoes on, it’s time to “Come Out and Dance”. Seriously? It’s clear that Steve didn’t really care much about lyrics at this point. The low point is “Another Deal Goes Down”, an attempt to get back to being rootsy and bluesy. It sounds like the worst sort of thing that was on Clapton’s albums from this period — except that it has a really hackish guitar solo from a session guy who might have had that in mind. “You’ll Keep on Searching” is another one that sounds like he was trying to reach back to latter day Traffic, with that sax. But then those terrible drums come in, along with lyrics like “Walked out in the pouring rain/to stop your pain./Cried out on a mountain high/Why life goes by?/Why love can die?/Oh, why?” Oh, why couldn’t a COLLEGE PROFESSOR write grammatical lyrics?
There is one slightly surprising change from the usual pattern. Winwood didn’t conclude the album with the lengthy, dreary “I Will Be Here”, complete with the tackiest AC sax since whatever Sting’s latest album was. Instead, there was the most experimental track Steve had done in years, “In the Light of Day”. Ambitious, but another failure. There’s a lack of dynamics that make similar stuff from Gabriel fascinating. Again, the lyrics are worthless platitudes. What happened to this guy? (Incidentally, the track foreshadows the title song of the following “Traffic” album, which wasn’t much better).
Not surprisingly, this was the beginning of Steve’s sales decline. This is where I got off the Winwood train. I never got back on.