---

Travis: Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou

Tyler: The full and royal name of the great man whose finest testament we are about to discuss.

To put it in personal context, to me this album existed first and vividly as a cassette purchased by my mom.  It qualifies most wholly as what an old friend and I call back-of-your-mom’s-car music.

Travis: This was also a CD owned by my mom and listened to in the Honda Accord that had our first car CD player, which was quite the big deal back in 1989ish.

This being the hit album Faith, by George Michael.

Tyler: Not to spoil the inevitable here, but Faith is a much better effort than Roll With It, immortally credited on a steely front cover to WINWOOD.

Travis: Another Winwood Mom’s car classic is Back in the High Life (I think) which my young brain interpreted the lyrics to as “Back in the high life again…Hakeem Olajuwon, comin back again.”

As for listening to George Michael as an adult, I never really did any full-album explorations, but enjoyed singles, most specifically “Father Figure,” on this album, and “Freedom ’90”, which is on the next one.

Tyler: I had a pretty good memory of all the songs on this one.  Moreso than other cassettes that bounced around the car, for one reason or another.

Travis: Most recently, I remembered George’s performance of “Somebody to Love” at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert which came in the aftermath of Mercury’s death from AIDS. He takes a song that you’d think only Freddie Mercury could sing and adds a few of his own little touches to it, and owns it. Brian May said that for a few seconds he believed Freddie Mercury was there with them. And as a song with heavy gospel roots, questioning God from the perspective of someone who can’t be himself in terms of sexual identity in public, it was the perfect song for George Michael to sing at that time.

I think we (the world of music fans) were pretty rough on a conflicted and talented person for the latter part of his career, really all of it after this album. Even as he was implicated in many tawdry things, he was supporting important causes (even just starting out, he and Wham! played a benefit concert for striking miners in England). Read the charitable giving section of his Wikipedia page and you’ll be bowled over, especially because almost none of it came out until after his death.

He never really figured out how to cope with the teen idol status that came from Wham!, or the legitimate superstar status that came from Faith.

All that said…Faith. To me, Travis, this album is really good. There are a few weak spots in my opinion but for the most part this is an amazing blend of pop, R&B, gospel, dance music, basically everything going on in the mainstream at the time and plenty that was from out of nowhere.

Even more impressive: he was only 24, I believe, when it was released, and he wrote and produced the whole thing, and played most of the keyboards as well.

Fun fact: this was the first album by a white solo artist to hit #1 on the R&B charts! Everyone loved this shit!

Tyler: And it is that good.  This ain’t some sad genre-hop from a bubblegum-pop star. Faith bangs. Even its lesser asides are forgivable and sometimes enjoyable.

24! That’s incredible.

Travis: He announced his presence as a solo artist on a duet with Aretha Franklin. He’s no dilettante.

There’s also a ton of Prince influence on this record, and I think it’s one of the more valiant efforts in that arena.

Shall we dive in to individual songs? Favorites and least favorites?

Tyler: Let us pray.

Honestly, the most disposable song here in my estimation is the last one, which I believe was a non-vinyl bonus track: “A Last Request (I Want Your Sex pt. 3).”  That song comes after this gorgeous torch ballad and is kind of untoward.

Travis: I also am not a fan of that one.

And honestly, I prefer the radio/music video edit of “I Want Your Sex,” generally, as the second half (“Part 2”, I suppose), when the horn section kicks in, is kinda cheesy and boring to me.

I bet the 9-minute version fucked hard in the club, but listening at home, I can skip it.

Tyler: I don’t mind it enough to skip it, but I often am disappointed when that horn riff begins.  “Oh yeah, we gotta get through this.”

Travis: The title track is undeniable. I think it’s a much weirder song than it’s given credit for—it takes the Bo Diddley beat and other hallmarks of early rock and roll to make a song that sounds nothing like early rock and roll at all.

Tyler: All-timer.  Bar none.

Travis: I suppose it must be acknowledged that it had a second life in cover form by Limp Bizkit, one of many late-90s covers resulting from Gen X’s irony poisoning and a general pre-millennium malaise/dead zone in popular culture.

Tyler: Fred Durst, king of Limp, changed the opening lyric, too. “A body like me.”  Haw!

Travis: Going in track order from there, “Father Figure” is either my favorite or second-favorite George Michael song, depending on the day. I have no idea if it is problematic lyrically, and I don’t care, because it rules. It is sexy as hell and just generally kicks ass. Apparently he’d intended it to be more of a club track, but in messing around with it he removed the snare and liked it better that way, and reworked a few things to turn it into the midtempo ballad excellence it remains to this day.

Tyler: It’s fucking fantastic.  Five-plus minutes of pure pop delirious sensual fantasy.  You wanna talk about a track that must’ve been fire on the dance floor.  It played through FM radio, too, it plays on vinyl, it plays to fucking beautiful effect soundtracking Charlize Theron laying waste to a host of unlucky bad guys in Atomic Blonde.  It’s “Father Figure,” and there’s not a thing about it in need of change.  It rules indeed.

Travis: “One More Try” is not my favorite, but he sings the hell out of it.

Tyler: “One More Try” made me very sad as a child.  I associated it with an underqualified, dismissed babysitter for whom I’d developed a familial affection. This is a thing that happened.

Back here in reality, it’s a bit long, but I’m okay with it because it is so damn effectively tortured.  “Kissing A Fool” is my preferred ballad on Faith, by a sizable measure.  But “One More Try,” like you say, has one hell of a performance in it.

Travis: I too prefer “Kissing a Fool.” Like we said earlier, it’d be an effective album closer, and it shows he can do classic vocal pop as well as any of his other genre experiments. Sort of zooming through the middle of the album, “Hard Day” works for me as a funky, sexy, glossy 80s R&B song. It kind of feels, via bassline and beat, like a trial run for my other potential favorite George Michael song, “Freedom ’90,” which I watched the video of on YouTube the other day. It still also rules. A David Fincher joint.

“Hand to Mouth” the lyrics about socioeconomic decay feel really out of place with the breathy sexy vibes. I don’t skip it, but it’s kind of a throwaway.

Tyler: “Freedom ’90” also might be my favorite.

“Hard Day” definitely feels like a song intended for some heavy action on a dance floor.

“Hand To Mouth” has its heart in the right place, which I think is the best thing you can say for it.  I like that it’s there, this softer breezy dark protest-y confection.  Like so many tracks here, too, it’s got harmonies worthy of framing and hanging on a wall.

Travis: “Look at Your Hands” I see as a sleeper jam. I didn’t remember it at all, but listening to it now it feels like Prince’s “Cream” as done by Some Girls-era Stones and really, what more could one want from anything?

Tyler: “Look At Your Hands” has some serious anger.  “Two fat children and a drunken man.”

“Monkey” is catchy—well, pretty much everything Faith offers is—and funky and effective.  It fits along with everything, and I’ve nothing bad to say about it, except that the monkey sound effects have gotta go.

Travis: Yeah, the monkey sound effects are not great. I’ll say I prefer the single version (a remix by Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, with re-recorded vocals), to the album version, but the album version is still good.

Bringing them up, it makes me feel like there is probably an underrecognized Janet Jackson influence on some of the proceedings here, as well.

Tyler: Think we’re talking MJ, too? Collar tug.

Travis: I’m sure George Michael definitely saw Michael Jackson as someone to aspire to, coming from a group and making it big as a solo, adult artist. And as weird as Michael Jackson got, I think people were all still pretty favorable in their feelings towards him at this point. I think Bad was fairly contemporary with Faith.

Tyler: I wouldn’t say Faith has the new jack swing.  But you might hear it there.

Travis: A little early for that, maybe?

Tyler: I was thinking the same.

Travis: I honestly have really nothing substantively bad to say about this album. Listening to it over the past couple of weeks has been a treat.

Tyler: It’s so good!  I enjoyed having this in the rotation as well.  It’s strange, but the achievement of it makes me proud of George M., an artist talented and tormented in equal measure.

Travis: It makes me feel profoundly uncynical, just how fun so much of it is. It’s pop in all the good ways and none of the bad.

Tyler: I buy the lyrics, too.  These feel considered and, when called for, confessional.  Prince loved Joni, and I don’t doubt that George Michael did as well.  Faith is all the things we’ve discussed and more.  It’s also a singer-songwriter’s triumph.

Typically, we might break down further work worthy of exploration, but I can’t say I know the albums after Faith, not even Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1, the followup to Faith and the source of “Freedom ’90.”

There was a hot track that saw video play in the mid-‘90s, “Too Funky.”

Travis: “Too Funky” is rad. “Freedom ’90” is rad.

As with many pop stars of his age, he mastered the music video. I think a YouTube jaunt through his official playlist would be a good way to spend an hour or so.

None as much as “Freedom ’90” which may have ushered me into puberty.

Tyler: The video for “Freedom ’90” is ballsy enough to shatter the mythology of its immediate predecessor.  And it is utter sexuality.

Travis: I’d also say to give the Queen tribute concert performance a gander. It’s a star owning the stage in front of an insane crowd at the height of his powers.

Not as essential from that performance, but hilarious and of its time: Elton John and Axl Rose doing “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Tyler: Elton and George did a real good “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” in the early ’90s.

George Michael!  He was a bad-ass dude!

Travis: Indeed. In…deed.

---