Style
Older found Michael experimenting with new musical styles and expanding his artistic horizons. Particularly notable was the jazz flavour of the albums sound. The album marked a departure to the synthesised production of his previous projects, delivering a more organic sound with the inclusion of brass and strings. Michael was particularly inspired by the music of Antonio Carlos Jobim, who died in 1994, and to whom the album was dedicated. Another big influence was the album's producer, Johnny Douglas, who has mixed several George Michael songs as B-sides. They first met when Douglas produced Lisa Moorish's version of "I'm Your Man" in 1995, to which Michael added backing vocals. They both began to work together soon after, and they co-wrote "Spinning the Wheel" together and also co-wrote and produced "Fastlove". Douglas also played keyboards on those tracks.
Overall, the style of the album was melancholy, dark and sad. George Michael complemented this departure making a dramatic change of his clothes, hair style and overall appearance. The long hair, beard and jeans that represented him to the common knowledge during the late eighties, were replaced with a buzz cut and mostly leather clothes. Michael commented, on the The Oprah Winfrey Show about that new appearance:
"The way my image changed in Europe was that I looked very different, I had very short hair—I had really a kind of gay look in a way. I think I was trying to tell people I was okay with it, I just really didn't want to share it with journalists. The album I made in the middle nineties called Older was a tribute to Anselmo, really; there was a dedication to him on the album and fairly obvious male references. To my fans and the people that were really listening, I felt like I was trying to come out with them."
Michael grew back a longer hair style during 1998, as was first shown on the video he recorded for "Outside", premiered near the end of that year.
Read more about this topic: Older (album)
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“His style is eminently colloquial, and no wonder it is strange to meet with in a book. It is not literary or classical; it has not the music of poetry, nor the pomp of philosophy, but the rhythms and cadences of conversation endlessly repeated.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)