6 Songs You Didn’t Know Steve Winwood Wrote for Other Musicians JJ

Do you feel that you just don’t want to work with other musicians? >> Uh it has certain possibilities that way of working. Do something that would be very different than if I >> Steve Winwood spent decades [music] writing songs that defined an era, but not every song he wrote stayed with him. Some of his best work ended up in other hands, and what happened next is stranger than you might expect.

Six, Smiling Faces. [music] Steve Winwood was 19 years old when he co-wrote Smiling Faces with Jim Capaldi and Chris Wood in a cottage in the Berkshire countryside. Traffic had retreated there in the spring of 1967 [music] to write and record their debut album away from the noise of London. Living communally in a farmhouse with no running hot water and a great deal of uncertainty about what kind of band they were going to be.

The song that emerged from those sessions was something unusual, a swirling psychedelic piece with a melody that moved in unexpected directions and a lyric that [music] sat somewhere between mysticism and melancholy. >> [music] >> It appeared on Mr. Fantasy, Traffic’s [music] debut, in December 1967. Most people who heard it assumed it would stay in that world forever.

Blood, Sweat and Tears had other ideas. The New York band, [music] led by vocalist David Clayton-Thomas, was building something ambitious, a fusion of rock, jazz, and brass [music] that nobody had quite attempted at that scale before. For their self-titled second album in 1968, they chose Smiling Faces as one of their covers, and they transformed it entirely.

[music] Where Traffic’s version was hazy and exploratory, Blood, Sweat and Tears played it with the precision and muscle of a full horn section and a vocalist who treated every note like a declaration. The song opened up in their hands and became something larger than it had been on Traffic’s record. The album it appeared on is one of the most decorated in rock history.

Blood, Sweat and Tears won album of the year at the 1970 Grammy Awards, beating out Abbey Road and the Nashville Skyline album by Bob Dylan. It sold over 3 million copies in the United States alone and spent 7 weeks at number one. Smiling Faces sat [music] inside all of that, a Steve Winwood composition from a Berkshire farmhouse now occupying space on [music] one of the most celebrated records of the decade.

>> I’m a man and Gimme Some Lovin’ Keep On Running, which was which was great. >> Most people who bought the album had no idea who had written it. What makes the story worth telling is the distance between [music] the two versions. Traffic wrote the song in the middle of a creative experiment, living on top of each other in a cold cottage, trying to figure out what they were.

Blood, Sweat and Tears recorded it in a New York studio with a full brass arrangement and a clear commercial vision. The same song, two entirely different worlds and a 19-year-old from Birmingham who wrote the original without knowing where it was going to end up. Five, Gimme Some Lovin’. Steve Winwood [music] wrote Gimme Some Lovin’ in 4 days in October 1966 while ill with a high fever.

He [music] was 18 years old and already a star, the lead singer of the Spencer Davis Group, [music] playing to enormous crowds at a time when most of his contemporaries were still in school. He co-wrote the song with his brother Muff Winwood and Spencer Davis himself and the three of them recorded it in a single frenzied [music] session that matched the urgency of the lyric.

>> [music] >> The song reached number two in the UK and broke the top 10 in the United States. It was one of the defining records of the British Invasion raw, pumping, built around a Hammond organ riff that hit the listener like a physical force. >> [music] >> Winwood was a teenager with a fever when he wrote it.

You can hear the heat in every bar. [music] What happened to the song over the following decades is the story of a piece of music that refused to stay in one place. >> It particularly create something that we [music] felt it was unique and peculiar to ourselves. >> It was [music] covered almost immediately by other artists and has never really stopped being covered since.

But the version that gave it its second and most famous life came in 1978 [music] when John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd released the Blues Brothers debut album Briefcase Full of Blues. Their recording of Gimme Some Lovin’ reached number 18 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and introduced the song to an entirely new generation of listeners who had not been alive when Winwood recorded the original.

The Blues Brothers performed it [music] on Saturday Night Live to an audience of millions and the song became theirs in the public imagination almost overnight. [music] The Blues Brothers phenomenon was enormous and fast-moving, [music] a comedy sketch that became a band, a band that became a film, a film that became a cultural touchstone.

Gimme Some Lovin’ was part of all of it. It played over the end credits of the 1980 [music] Blues Brothers movie, was performed live at massive concerts, and became one of the most recognizable party anthems of its era. Steve Winwood wrote it at 18 with a fever [music] as a Spencer Davis Group record aimed at British pop radio.

It ended up in a movie, on Saturday Night Live, and in the permanent soundtrack of American popular culture. Four, Dear Mr. Fantasy. Jim Capaldi walked into a Traffic rehearsal session one afternoon with a piece of paper covered in words he had written on the back of an envelope. He handed it to Steve Winwood without explanation.

Winwood read it, sat down at the piano, and within a short time had a melody. The lyric Capaldi had brought was strange and dreamlike, a plea to a fantasy figure to play a song and make the writer happy, wrapped in imagery that did not resolve into any single meaning. Winwood did not try to explain it. He set it to music that matched its quality of drift and longing, and the result was Dear Mr.

Fantasy, the opening track and title song of Traffic’s [music] debut album. It was recorded at 1:00 in the morning in November 1967. The recording engineer, who was [music] present later, said it was his favorite memory from his entire career. Traffic never released it as a single. It lived as an album track, beloved by the people who found it, but never pushed into the mainstream.

Then, the Grateful [music] Dead discovered it. The San Francisco band, already one of the most dedicated live acts in rock history, [music] began performing Dear Mr. Fantasy in their sets during the 1980s [music] and continued playing it through the 1990s. >> [music] >> For a band whose entire ethos was built around extended [music] improvisation and communal musical exploration, the song was a natural fit.

Its open structure invited them to take it [music] somewhere new every night. Grateful Dead audiences, who had never heard of Traffic, knew Dear Mr. Fantasy as a Dead song, [music] which is one of the stranger forms of musical inheritance in the rock cannon. >> Um it was a a a gift to a lot of keyboard players in in rock bands.

>> Crosby, Stills & Nash also recorded it, and the song appears on their 1991 box set, bringing it to yet another audience with no direct connection to Traffic. Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper [music] performed it on their 1969 live album. The song kept moving, kept finding new interpreters, kept arriving in contexts that Winwood and Capaldi had not imagined when they made it at 1:00 in the morning in a London studio.

[music] Winwood has performed it live with Eric Clapton at the Crossroads Guitar Festival and on their 2008 joint tour, which produced a live recording released in 2009. [music] Three, Kissing With Confidence. Lynn Goldsmith was one of the most celebrated rock photographers of the 1970s and early 1980s, known for iconic [music] portraits of artists including Bruce Springsteen, Bob Marley, and Patti Smith.

In 1983, she did something that surprised everyone who knew her professionally. She made an album. Not under her own name, under the name Will Powers, a fictional self-help guru whose voice was pitched down to sound male, whose entire persona was built around satirizing the motivational speaker culture that was saturating American life at the time.

The album was called Dancing for Mental Health, and it needed songs. Goldsmith assembled one of the most unlikely writing teams in the history of pop music to help her make them. Steve Winwood was one of the co-writers on the album’s lead single, Kissing With Confidence. The other co-writers [music] were Nile Rodgers of Chic, Todd Rundgren, and lyricist Jacob Brackman, a collection of names that made no obvious sense together >> [music] >> and produced something that could not have come from any single one of them alone. Carly Simon sang the lead vocals

without being credited on the record. >> [music] >> Winwood played keyboards throughout the album. The single reached number 17 on the UK singles chart and was included on the original Now That’s What I Call Music compilation, the first volume of a series that would eventually become one of the biggest-selling compilation franchises in history.

>> [music] >> A Steve Winwood song is on the very first Now That’s What I Call Music and [music] almost nobody who bought it knew he had written it. The song is a genuinely strange piece of work and strange in a way that suits its purpose perfectly. It is disco-inflected pop dressed up as therapy, a parody of self-help culture delivered with enough musical craft to function as an actual pop record.

Winwood’s [music] keyboard work gives it a warmth and depth that the satirical concept alone could not have provided. Nile Rodgers gives it a groove. Todd Rundgren mixed it with the kind of detail that turns a good track into a great one. Carly Simon’s uncredited voice gives it a soaring emotional quality that sits [music] in deliberate tension with the deadpan spoken word sections.

Nobody who bought the single in 1983 would have guessed [music] that the man who wrote Gimme Some Lovin’ and Dear Mr. Fantasy had a co-writing credit on a disco novelty record about [music] kissing techniques. That is part of what makes it one of the most interesting footnotes in Steve Winwood’s career, proof that a great songwriter [music] does not stay in one lane. Two, Makes Me Wanna Pray.

Christina Aguilera was one of the biggest-selling [music] artists in the world when she began work on Back to Basics in 2006. She wanted the album to reach back into the history of American music, soul, jazz, blues, the kind of sound that existed before the pop machine she had grown up inside. She wanted it to feel genuine, rather than referential, rooted in something real, rather than simply imitating a style.

To achieve [music] that, she and her producers did something that most pop artists of her stature [music] would not have considered. They went looking for material in the Traffic catalog, a group of British musicians from Birmingham, who had made their most important records four decades earlier. The song they found was Glad, an [music] instrumental track from Traffic’s 1970 album John Barleycorn Must Die.

Winwood had written it as a purely musical piece, no lyric, [music] no vocal, just a flowing keyboard and guitar composition that moved through its structure with the unhurried ease of something that did not need words to make its point. Aguilera and her team built Makes Me Wanna Pray around a sample of Glad, crediting Winwood as a featured artist and bringing him into one of the most commercially successful albums of that year.

>> [music] >> Back to Basics debuted at number one in multiple countries, sold over 8 million copies worldwide, >> [music] >> and won Aguilera the Grammy for Best Contemporary Album. Winwood’s fingerprints are all over Makes Me Wanna Pray in a way [music] that goes beyond a sample clearance.

The warmth of the original Glad recording gives the track its emotional foundation, and Aguilera builds her vocal around it with obvious respect for the source material. The combination is unlikely in the way that the best musical collisions always are. A 2006 R&B and soul album finding its center of gravity in a 1970 Traffic instrumental.

Two artists separated by three decades [music] and an entirely different musical world, connected by a piece of music Winwood wrote in a studio in London with no particular commercial ambition. The song reached the US top 40 and received substantial radio play. Most of the listeners who heard it had never heard of Traffic.

Most of them had no idea that the warmth underneath Aguilera’s voice came from a keyboard Winwood had played 36 years earlier in an entirely different context. One, Colored Rain. Steve Winwood wrote Colored Rain with Jim Capaldi [music] and Chris Wood during the same cottage sessions that produced Smiling Phases and Dear Mr. Fantasy.

It appeared [music] on the Mr. Fantasy album in 1967. Another piece of the layered exploratory sound that Traffic were developing in that period, [music] a rock song with a psychedelic quality and a melody that moved with a kind of unhurried confidence that Winwood [music] brought to everything he wrote in his late teens.

The band recorded it, put it on the album, and moved forward. Then, other people started paying attention. Eric Burdon and The New Animals were the first. Burdon, the former lead singer of The Animals, had reinvented [music] himself at the head of a new lineup and the new band recorded Colored Rain with an arrangement that featured a young Andy Summers on guitar.

Andy Summers, who would go on to be the guitarist of The Police, one of the [music] biggest bands in the world in the early 1980s, played on a Steve Winwood cover in 1968 [music] at the very beginning of his professional career. That connection is almost completely unknown. Summers was years away from Every Breath You Take and Roxanne and the entire [music] Police phenomenon when he laid down that guitar part on a Traffic song in a recording [music] studio in London.

>> It was like colored rain, baby. Taste like >> [music] >> colored rain. Bring down colored >> Slade recorded it later in 1972 during their imperial period as one of the biggest glam rock acts in [music] Britain. The Wolverhampton band had a run of number one singles in the early 70s that few British acts have matched before or since.

And their version of Colored Rain brought Winwood’s song into a completely different sonic [music] universe, loud, stomping, built for arenas rather than the intimate psychedelic world of Mr. Fantasy. Two more different recordings of the same song would be difficult to imagine. Both trace back to that farmhouse in Berkshire, to a 19-year-old with a piano and two bandmates and no clear picture of what they were building.

What the story of Colored Rain illustrates, >> [music] >> better than almost any other entry in Winwood’s writing catalog, is the unpredictability of where a song goes once it leaves the room where it was made. A future member of The Police, a glam rock chart act from the Midlands, Steve Winwood wrote songs that outlived the bands he wrote them for.

They traveled across decades, genres, and artists nobody saw coming. That is what great songwriting does. It keeps moving long after you let it go. Subscribe for more.