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:
“Many great writers have been extraordinarily awkward in daily exchange, but the greatest give the impression that their style was nursed by the closest attention to colloquial speech.”
—Thornton Wilder (1897–1975)
“Everything ponderous, viscous, and solemnly clumsy, all long- winded and boring types of style are developed in profuse variety among Germans—forgive me the fact that even Goethe’s prose, in its mixture of stiffness and elegance, is no exception, being a reflection of the “good old time” to which it belongs, and a reflection of German taste at a time when there still was a “German taste”Ma rococo taste in moribus et artibus.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Where there is no style, there is in effect no point of view. There is, essentially, no anger, no conviction, no self. Style is opinion, hung washing, the calibre of a bullet, teething beads.... One’s style holds one, thankfully, at bay from the enemies of it but not from the stupid crucifixions by those who must willfully misunderstand it.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)