George Michael
Older

Who else could title a song “Jesus To a Child” if not him, the Lucio Dalla of England, the Franti with the infamous smile, the genius who was not misunderstood, indeed, we understood him all too well, Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, more commonly known as George Michael?

Free from compromises and master of himself from the start, lyricist, composer, almost always involved in production and approach to instruments, he reached 1996 at the age of thirty-three with an already consumed and multi-award-winning band with his friend Ridgeley, two albums, one of which (Faith) is considered one of the most profitable debuts of all time, and the other (Listen Without Prejudice - Vol 1) less impactful but still epochal and followed by a haul of awards. He had legal battles with Sony because the results achieved were not enough for him, live concerts where he revealed a resounding, spontaneous, never uncertain voice, explosive and harmonic across multiple octaves, so much so that Queen sought him out after Freddie’s death to celebrate him, but he only engaged minimally, out of respect. That’s how he was.

Just before gathering the strength to prepare “Older”, he lost, in 1993, the love of his life, Anselmo Feleppa. From this emerged “Jesus To a Child”, where the smiling gaze of his lost partner appears, and “You Have Been Loved”, where he recounts a day he met his partner's mother at the cemetery. In 2004, “Send Me an Angel” would come, closing the triptych. The writer of these words has never thoroughly dissected it because they don’t love it.

“Older” arrived six years after its predecessor in a haze of opiates duly rolled by an employee hired for that purpose, with a heterogeneous Michael, physically in shape (well, except for the cloud of smoke rising between the masters, editor's note) who provided 11 honest tracks, with some of rarefied organoleptic quality, others less so, others revisitable. But the structure stands on solid foundations.

The beams are undoubtedly the soft and painful plots of the slow tracks. “Jesus To a Child”, “Older”, “To Be Forgiven”, and “You Have Been Loved” are truly milestones if taken as a benchmark in the artist’s catalog, which isn’t vast.

Produced with an abundance of strings and synths, they shine with their own light and have solitude as their common denominator, which makes it easy, perhaps predictably, to compare him with the lamented Dalla. It’s not commiseration: it’s an almost methodical search for pain, not to drown in it, but just enough to have that suffering which taints, which creates the aura to compose, and almost always masterpieces come out of it.

In strictly club terms, the album only accelerates on the occasion of “Fastlove”, which is radio-friendly, sexy, and 'Michaelian' just the right way. It pleases even the most distracted listener, in short.

“The Strangest Thing” deserves a separate mention, another embedded pearl, which isn’t a slow song nor a dance number, but pure introspection.

Like all geniuses, or rather, like all serial killers, George always left a trace. By now, you knew that the next album of unpublished songs would come out centuries later (other than “Patience” would arrive in 2004, editor's note) and then you started wondering: in the meantime, who will he target? What will he do? Who will he get involved with? He would get involved with a policeman, two years later, in a bar; he would be caught, arrested, and sentenced to community service. He wouldn’t be fazed: between sweeping an atrium and sorting recycling, he’d start whistling a tune, find it cool, lay it on a track, call it “Outside” and it would be another hit. Who was it again that produced hits by whistling? Hi, Lucio.