Most musicians never get the chance to say how much their heroes mean to them. Although you can spend your entire life trying to make someone proud, there are only so many opportunities that you get to let them know how much their songs have meant to you in the most important times of your life. George Michael did manage to get into the world of show business relatively early but once he flew solo, he knew he wanted to pay tribute to the work of John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
Granted, if you’ve seen any British singer walk into the limelight in the past 50 years, they owe a lot to the songwriting duo behind The Beatles without even knowing it. Despite being joined at the hip most of the time, though, Lennon and McCartney always had their own defining characteristics that made their work easy to tell apart.
On the one hand, you had Lennon, the tortured artist who used his songs as a way to exorcise his demons. Compared to every other craftsman songwriter, Lennon was more interested in making songs that could stand up as works of art, either putting a political message behind it on ‘Power to the People’ or talking about his love for domestic life on his later albums like Double Fantasy.
By comparison, McCartney seemed to get into songwriting to make people happy. He could still make caustic rockers when he wanted, but McCartney’s greatest strength came from writing ballads, usually involving a lot of sophisticated chords to tell a story on songs like ‘My Love’ and ‘Silly Love Songs’.
Once Michael broke free from Wham!, his intention was to mould himself into an artist who could be taken as seriously as his heroes. Although Faith fell more in line with pop stars of the day like Prince and Michael Jackson, Michael managed to throw in two songs on his sophomore effort that contained little hints of the ‘Nerk Twins’.
According to Michael, ‘Praying for Time’ was meant to be a Lennon homage, talking about the greater problems with the world, while ‘Heal the Pain’ was the comforting ballad he attributed to McCartney. While it may have just been meant as an inspirational guide, Michael actually captured the essence of what Lennon and McCartney stood for.
Whereas ‘Praying for Time’ has Lennon’s cynical view of the world, ‘Heal the Pain’ is the kind of openhearted ballad that looks to wipe away the listener’s tears and assure them that everything will be alright. Michael was looking to just show his love for his heroes, but he couldn’t have imagined that McCartney would try his hand at singing it.
When performing ‘Heal the Pain’ as a duet, Michael was taken aback that McCartney saw something in the song, saying, “I made one record to show how much I loved Lennon [‘Praying For Time’], I made another record to show how much I loved McCartney. I didn’t dream McCartney would ever sing it. And actually, when he sings it, it sounds like a Paul McCartney record!”
That was the whole point of what Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 was meant to say, though. Outside of the need for musical harmony that Michael talked about throughout the record, he was more interested in making the kind of music that served as a love letter to his eclectic taste in music.
