News

• Nov 06 1990

  Press Release: Refugees of the...

  

  Refugees of the Heart represents the newest example of Steve Winwood's musical vision. The creative team from Roll With It returns in peak form, with Winwood at the producer's helm and Tom Lord Alge engineering the recording sessions in England and Nashville. Will Jennings co-writes 7 of the 8 tracks with Winwood, a creative relationship that goes back to Arc of a Diver. As on Roll With It, Winwood also collaborates with Traffic bandmate Jim Capaldi on one song, the album's rousing lead-off single "One and Only Man".

• Aug 23 1990

  Off the Record Specials: Westwood...

  

  Steve Winwood: It was a line from a song, which was a, uh - we actually wrote, part of the verse was actually a haiku, which is a Japanese form in a, a poetic form, and it was, "On the street, the refugees from a war that was lost in the heart." I think it just seemed to sum up a lot of the feeling of the album for us, you know? It just kind of - Refugees of the Heart, I mean, the whole haiku was obviously too much to use as the title, so we just condensed it to Refugees of the Heart. We just like it!

• Dec 21 1988

  Winwood, wife's early yule gift:...

  

  Rocker Steve Winwood and his wife got an early Christmas gift this year, an 8-pound, 7-ounce daughter. Elizabeth Dawn Winwood was born Dec. 1 at Baptist Hospital to Winwood, 40, and his wife, Eugenia, 29.

  The couple, who married Jan. 17, 1987, also have an 18-month-old daughter, Mary Clare. Winwood's latest album, "Roll With It," has sold more than 2 million copies this year, and his single "Holding On" is on Billboard's Top 40.

• Dec 01 1988

  "From Mr Fantasy to Mr...

  

  Characteristically, Winwood - as obliging a bloke as you'll find - isn't disturbed that people sometimes fail to associate him with the best-known song of his career, a song that has been a dance-floor burner since he co-wrote and sang it as a teenage prodigy with the Spencer Davis Group in 1966. Perversely, he almost seems to enjoy the lack of recognition.

• Nov 23 1988

  "Coming to America" Musician, Nov....

  

  I really love Americans and American musical roots," Steve Winwood offers. "It could be my British need for discipline that makes me admire the American appetite for freedom and passion. I've always been fascinated with the possibilities of drawing all these Southern, Detroit, Caribbean and African grooves together, along with what some people hear as 'Church of England' thing in my keyboards. I don't argue that it isn't spiritual-sounding. I'm a former choirboy, after all, and I've played Sunday organ at this church in Gloucestershire until last June, when I returned from touring to find that the vicar had died. I think my music remains more individual than my influences, but I have to confess" - he pauses of a swallow of sandwich - "that, in fact, I based the original Traffic on Jr. Walker's All-Stars!"

• Aug 18 1988

  Steve Winwood Offers Optimism

  

  Mr. Winwood has drawn on soul music since his teens, when as the lead singer for the Spencer Davis Group he delivered some of the richest, reediest vocals in British pop. With Traffic, in the late 1960's and early 1970's, he also dipped into jazz and Caribbean music. With his first solo album in 1977, Mr. Winwood began to smooth out and focus his songs to provide reassurance above all. His current hit, ''Roll With It,'' echoes his first Spencer Davis Group successes, but where the old songs were frantic with lust, ''Roll With It'' is reflective; it's also deliberately backward-looking, copying old Memphis soul instead of adapting it.