FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
George Michael - Faith
___________
BECAUSE tomorrow…
PHOTO CREDIT: Michael Putland
marks five years since we lost the incredible George Michael, I wanted to feature his finest solo album in Vinyl Corner. Faith was released on 30th October, 1987. Such an outstanding and timeless record, Michael wrote and produced every track on the recording except for one (Look at Your Hands). Less Pop-orientated than his work with Wham!, it borrows more from Black-inspired Pop and R&B. I was very young when Faith was released, and I think it was the 1990s when I first heard it. The title track ranks alongside George Michael’s very best songs. There is a mix of uplifting and catchy choruses, introspective and personal lyrics, all tied together by Michael’s stunningly soulful and powerful voice. Faith peaked at number one on the U.K. album chart and US Billboard 200. Faith spawned four number one singles on the Billboard Hot 100: Faith, Father Figure, One More Try, and Monkey. The album is easy and inexpensive to buy on vinyl. Retrospective reviews see Faith as one of the most important albums of the 1980s. It confirmed Michael as a major Pop superstar who was at the top of his game. Faith won Michael accolades, including Album of the Year at the 31st Grammy Awards. Michael was awarded three awards at the 1989 American Music Awards. There is no denying the quality and legacy of Faith!
Before finishing off, I am going to source a couple of reviews. Faith won acclaim in 1987 and, in years since, it has been celebrated and listened by multiple generations. Five years after the world said goodbye to one of music’s true icons, I hope that people listen to albums like Faith. In their review, AllMusic said the following about Faith:
“A superbly crafted mainstream pop/rock masterpiece, Faith made George Michael an international solo star, selling over ten million copies in the U.S. alone as of 2000. Perhaps even more impressively, it also made him the first white solo artist to hit number one on the R&B album charts. Michael had already proven the soulful power of his pipes by singing a duet with Aretha Franklin on the 1987 smash "I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)," but he went even farther when it came to crafting his own material, using sophisticated '70s soul as an indispensable part of his foundation. Of course, it's only a part. Faith's ingenuity lies in the way it straddles pop, adult contemporary, R&B, and dance music as though there were no distinctions between them. In addition to his basic repertoire of funky dance-pop and airy, shimmering ballads, Michael appropriates the Bo Diddley beat for the rockabilly-tinged title track, and proves himself a better-than-decent torch singer on the cocktail jazz of "Kissing a Fool." Michael arranged and produced the album himself, and the familiarity of many of these songs can obscure his skills in those departments -- close listening reveals his knack for shifting elements in and out of the mix and adding subtle embellishments when a little emphasis or variety is needed. Though Faith couldn't completely shake Michael's bubblegum image in some quarters, the album's themes were decidedly adult. "I Want Your Sex" was the most notorious example, of course, but even the love songs were strikingly personal and mature, grappling with complex adult desires and scarred by past heartbreak. All of it adds up to one of the finest pop albums of the '80s, setting a high-water mark that Michael was only able to reach in isolated moments afterward”.
I am a huge fan of George Michael, and I love most of his music. As much as I love Wham!, I feel his solo work is his very best. Faith is the most remarkable single work he released. Pitchfork noted, in their review, how Michael was trying to find out who he was and move forward at quite a dark time in his life. Faith seems like a reawakening and completely new phase for him:
“Michael felt isolated, anxious over what to do next—the future seemed elusive and unstable, as precarious as a song’s placement on the pop charts. He was sinking into what he would later characterize as an eight-month long-depression, wondering if he even wanted to return to music. In the spring of ’86, two months before the final Wham! Show at London’s Wembley Stadium, Michael released a solo single called “A Different Corner.” Accompanied by a stark, black-and-white video, it was a sad and strange song that seemed to disappear as it happened, the brief snowflakes of synth and Michael’s tenor evaporating into air. It’s as gorgeous as it is uncertain of itself, quietly stealing back every emotion it offers, leaving behind a crumpled blankness. “The problem was just that I had developed a character for the outside world that wasn’t me,” he said. “So I made the decision to uncreate the person I had created and become more real.
“Out of the deep mournful glow of the organ, emerges… an acoustic guitar? Strumming the Bo Diddley beat? It sounds almost frail playing against a rhythmic skeleton of snaps, handclaps, and whispers across the snare rim. The camera drifts over Michael’s new image: leather jacket shrugging loosely from his shoulders, his gaze buried somewhere beneath impenetrable sunglasses, pretending to strum a sunburst archtop guitar.
In 1987, popular rock music was trying fill arenas with enormous waves of echo; “Faith”’s chords sounded crisp as the blue jeans pasted to Michael’s ass in the video. He was employing rock as a texture, as a signifier of history and depth, absorbing the guitar rhythms of the ’50s and ’60s just as he embedded the drums of the Motown songs from his youth in tracks like Wham!’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.” It made Michael’s work as serious as it was playful, taking established songforms and converting them into modern pop.
The rest of Faith embodies this approach, a montage of different colors and tempos from pop’s unabridged past—the fluttering rockabilly of the title track, the deluxe synthetic bath of “Father Figure,” and the hardboiled synth funk of “I Want Your Sex” all occur on the same side of an album, like alternate histories talking to each other through time, all before “One More Try” wafts in like wind through an empty cathedral.
During the sessions for Faith, Michael and engineer Chris Porter occasionally recorded songs measure by measure, with Michael singing fragments of verses against a rudimentary LinnDrum pattern. Some of Michael’s songs didn’t even have physical demos before they were captured in the studio; they’d reel out fitfully from his head as they were recorded. The highlights of the darker, more club-lit corners of the album’s second side, “Hard Day” and “Monkey,” were constructed in this way, built on a program of minimal rhythmic cross-hatchings from Michael’s drum machine, his voice dancing between spotlights of synth bass.
Even through the dense programming, Michael’s voice remains at the center of the record. It always shapeshifts beyond its form, whether whispering through “Father Figure”’s garden of smoke or exchanging enthusiastic choruses with the choir that eventually materializes from it. His voice’s most powerful showcase, the peak of Michael’s career, is in the mournful procession of “One More Try.” The song technically lacks a chorus; in its place is an evolving verse whose vocal melody sounds unhinged from any of its chord changes, swimming upwards through an arctic fog. His voice starts to rapidly escalate through notes; when he sings “I don’t want to learn to/Hold you, touch you…” he hits a note of such trembling uncertainty that it bends like curved glass.
“One More Try” is lyrically tentative, a gospel-pop song that’s faintly baffled by the idea of its own salvation. It sits in the perspective of someone too wounded to open themselves up to another person, trapped in an in-between state. Faith itself seems stranded between identities in its reckless skating through genres, from rock to synth pop to the skipping pulse of clubs. It’s an album that’s divided down the center between faith and funk, an album on which the sex song is actually about monogamy—an album that reveals more of itself the more one pays attention to the drift of its details.
“I feel this is not a pop album,” Michael told SPIN in 1987. He thought Faith was more musically sophisticated, that it resembled the black pop and dance records he was listening to at the time. On “Hand to Mouth,” he displays an evolving social consciousness that seems inherited directly from Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, characters and their cyclical struggles spilling through a cityscape of wavering synths. He performed black pop forms so well, with such verisimilitude, that each song migrated flexibly between radio formats—Faith was the first album by a white solo artist to top Billboard’s R&B Chart and four of its six singles floated up the Hot 100, each hitting No. 1, one after the other”.
Go and get Faith on vinyl, as it is an essential album that everyone needs in their collection. Not dated or lacking in freshness, one can pick it up now and find new layers. I have been listening to Faith since the 1990s and it still stuns me! It is the most exceptional and fascinating album from…
A much-missed music genius.