Ever since his days as the teenage singer of the Spencer Davis Group in the ’60s, Steve Winwood was one of the most iconic rock stars of all time. That said, his biggest success actually didn’t come until 1986, when his album Back in the High Life spawned a series of hit singles (ultimately attaining triple-platinum status).
One of those singles, the album’s title track, was written in a surprisingly short amount of time. As the song’s co-writer, Will Jennings, told Songfacts, he had the title for “Back in the High Life Again” before anything else.
“We wrote those songs in the fall of ’84, and it was a long spell before he got in the studio in New York,” he said. “We had ‘Higher Love’ and several other songs, including ‘The Finer Things.’ And then it was toward the end of my stay over there and we still needed some other songs.”
“I had ‘Back in the High Life Again’ in this book that I carry with me of titles,” Jennings continued. “I pulled that out and I suddenly found the rest of the song, and I wrote that in about 30 minutes, and left it with Steve to put a melody to. So this is in ’84. And then I went back to California, and it was a year, I guess, before he went in the studio, sometime in ’85. I called one day and talked to Russ Titelman who was producing the album. They were doing it in New York. I asked him how it was going, and he said, ‘Oh it’s going great.’ He said ‘Higher Love’ came out great and ‘The Finer Things.’ I asked him how ‘Back in the High Life’ would come out. There was this little pause, and he said, ‘Steve hasn’t shown me that song.'”
As Jennings went on to explain, Winwood, who was going through a divorce, hadn’t written the music to the song yet.
“Because of the divorce, his wife got everything in the house, this big house in England,” Jennings said. “So he came up from London and went out to this house, which he still lives in and he had for years before he was married, and everything was gone, except there was a mandolin over in the corner of the living room. It was winter and it was dreary. He went over and picked up the mandolin, and he already had the words in his head, and that’s when he wrote the melody. He went back and not only cut a big hit which still is played so much today, but it was the title track of the album. And if I hadn’t asked about it, it would have just gone by, so that’s one that was saved at the last minute.”
Related: 1967 Rock Hit With Iconic Organ Riff Was Written and Sung by an 18-Year-Old
Though Back in the High Life was seen as something of a stylistic departure from Winwood’s previous solo work, he resisted the idea in a 1986 interview with The New York Times.
”Basically, the music doesn’t change,” he said. ”The presentation of it changes, the way it’s marketed changes, and it’s probably a little better technically done, but it always returns to what it basically is — simple rock-and-roll or R-and-B. It’s like the internal combustion engine, which is still the same as it was in 1905 — it’s just refined and it goes a lot better.”
Decades later, “Back in the High Life” — which includes backing vocals from James Taylor — is still a classic rock radio staple, not to mention a streaming hit. At the time of this writing, the song has over 62 million plays on Spotify alone.
Related: 1966 Classic Rock Anthem, Written in 10 Minutes, Was Sung by an 18-Year-Old
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