Winwood’s Nine Lives Released April 29
Highly anticipated album is legendary artist’s first in five years …

Nine Lives: a "musical portrait of spiritual transformation ..." Cover image courtesy Columbia Records

Nine Lives, the eagerly awaited new album by legendary singer- songwriter-multi-instrumentalist Steve Winwood, was released on April 29. The album, Winwood’s first full-length solo effort in five years, is also his first release on Columbia Records, with whom Winwood signed in early 2008.

Always a busy and engaging performer, Winwood further delighted fans by announcing that he’ll hit the road this year supporting Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on U.S. summer tour dates.

Nine Lives is Winwood's first full-length studio album since 2003’s About Time, which he released on his own label, Wincraft. Nine Lives opens an important new chapter in Winwood’s extraordinary career; each of its nine tracks paints a musical portrait of spiritual transformation, as Winwood continues the exploration of soul, rock, blues and world music that began in 1957 when, at age 9, he played guitar in his father’s band in Birmingham, England.

The nine songs on Nine Lives are “I’m Not Drowning,” “Fly,” “Raging Sea,” “Dirty City,” “We’re All Looking,” “Hungry Man,” “Secrets,” “At Times We Do Forget” and “Other Shore.” “Dirty City,” released Feb. 25 to radio, features guitar work by old friend and erstwhile Blind Faith bandmate Eric Clapton.

Nine Lives comes in the wake of a transcendent live collaboration between Winwood and Clapton at the Chicago Crossroads Guitar Festival in July 2007. Their electrifying onstage chemistry there led to three historic Winwood/Clapton concerts at New York’s Madison Square Garden in late February 2008; tickets for all three shows sold out in mere minutes.

Winwood, who turns 60 on March 12, was among the youngest members of the mid-’60s British Invasion. A prodigious Birmingham R&B scene guitarist and keyboardist by his mid-teens, he’d honed his musical chops backing up an impressive array of U.S. rock ‘n’ roll and blues pioneers when they toured the U.K., including Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.

Winwood and his older brother, Muff, joined Spencer Davis and drummer Pete York in 1962 in the Rhythm & Blues Quartet, a group that eventually morphed into the Spencer Davis Group. An intensely powerful and emotional vocalist and a formidable songwriter, Winwood launched the enormously influential “blue-eyed soul” movement with hits such as “Keep On Runnin’,” “Somebody Help Me” and, in particular, massively successful 1966 soul-pop anthem “Gimme Some Lovin’,” which entered the Grammy® Hall of Fame 30 years later. Winwood left the Spencer Davis Group in 1967 to form groundbreaking jazz-rock ensemble Traffic.

Photo courtesy Columbia Records

In 1966, 18-year-old Winwood first collaborated with Eric Clapton by recording three songs—“Steppin’ Out,” “Crossroads” and “I Want To Know”—as the Powerhouse (the group also included future Cream bassist Jack Bruce). Winwood and Clapton joined forces again in 1969, along with drummer Ginger Baker and bassist Rick Grech, to create Blind Faith, one of pop music’s first bona fide supergroups.

After Traffic’s 1974 breakup (the band successfully reformed and toured in the ’90s), Winwood launched a successful solo career that reached an apogee in the mid-1980s with four consecutive classic albums—Arc of a Diver (1981, platinum); Talking Back to the Night (1982); Back In the High Life (1986, triple platinum), which featured the number-one smash hit “Higher Love” and earned Winwood three Grammy® Awards, including Record of the Year; and the Billboard number-one Roll With It (1988, double platinum).

Throughout an unparalleled career spanning more than five decades, Winwood remained an in-demand session player, contributing his signature sound to an amazing variety of music by artists including Jimi Hendrix (Electric Ladyland), Joe Cocker (With a Little Help From My Friends), Leon Russell (Leon Russell), Lou Reed (Berlin), George Harrison (Dark Horse, George Harrison), Toots & the Maytals (Reggae Got Soul), Marianne Faithfull (Dangerous Acquaintances), David Gilmour (About Face), Tina Turner (Break Every Rule), Billy Joel (The Bridge), James Brown (Gravity), Rosanne Cash (King’s Record Shop), Jimmy Buffett (Hot Water), Phil Collins (... But Seriously), Etta James (Right Time), Paul Weller (Stanley Road), and Christina Aguilera (Back to Basics), among many others.

Fender News caught up with Winwood for a quick Q&A in Boston, where he'd just received an honorary doctoral degree from the Berklee College of Music ...

FN: You get a fat, dirty guitar sound on the first single from Nine Lives, “Dirty City.” How did you get that particular sound, and does it evoke the lyrics of the song?
SW: Well, yes. I hope it does, because, as you say, it’s a dirty sound, and “Dirty City” is about urban issues; issues that you hear so much about in particular about people who have children and growing up in inner-city areas.

The sound I get is a sound I’ve been using for a while—it’s a sound I’ve customized on the Cyber-Twin®. I don’t know what the basic patch was, but I’ve got a basic patch that we use quite a lot—I use it onstage, and for one or two different things, variations of it. And I use the top two pickups—you know, the combination of the top two.


FN: You probably have tons of vintage amps, but what drew you to a modern Cyber-Twin SE?
SW: Well, I was actually in Nashville, and a friend of mine who I written some things with and who used to play with me, called Anthony Crawford, had one. And he brought it ’round to my house—this must’ve been, probably, three or four years ago—and I plugged it in and I was knocked out with the sounds.

I’d been messing around with some kinds of physical modeling amps—scientifically modeled, I suppose, is the way to put it—and a lot of the other ones tended to sound a little bit … oh, how can I say it? “Plastic-y.” You know, just a little bit manipulated, the sound. But the Cyber-Twin seemed to have a depth with which, obviously from the tubes, it gave it more of a real organic sound, and I liked it very much straight away. So I went ahead and got one.

I would dearly like to see one … I know there is a 1x12”-speaker version (likely the Cyber-Deluxe®, since discontinued), but it’s not quite the same, and I don’t think the patches are all compatible and I don’t think it has the moving knobs. But if there was a 12” or, let’s say, a twin 10”, that would be nice (laughs).


FN: Are you still using your nylon-string Tele® Custom Thinline a lot?
SW: I certainly am! In fact, I’ve tried to get a second one.


FN: Those guitars are hard to find these days …
SW: Very difficult to find. I managed to track one down, and it was someone in the next village to where I live, in a very rural area.


FN: You must be kidding …
SW: I mean, he had one, and (starts to chuckle) so I managed to persuade him to let me take it off his hands. We swapped—I swapped him another guitar that I’ve used, and he was quite happy to do that. They’re not made—there’s nothing really made like that is there now? That Fender makes. If you ever think of remaking one of those, I should definitely be up for one.


FN: That’s right. On Nine Lives, what was your approach to building the solo you take on “We’re All Looking”?
SW: Oh, literally I just roll the track and improvise. The whole thing about a solo, I think, is that you’re trying to drive along with the groove of the song—that is the main part of a solo on a song like that.


FN: You’re right at home on a Hammond or a Stratocaster—do you think of yourself as a keyboardist who also plays guitar, a guitarist who also plays keys, or both equally?
SW: I actually like to think of myself as both, equally. Of course, I don’t do myself a lot of favors by playing both guitar and organ—some people forget that I’m a guitarist and think of me as a keyboardist, or vice versa. But it’s not like that—I think I’d like to think that I can do different things on both instruments.


FN: It’s not one or the other; it’s both.
SW: Yeah, yeah.


FN: After not having played with Eric Clapton for so long until your recent shows in Chicago and New York, what was the guitar interplay like between you two?
SW: It felt great. I had to adjust some of my sound a little bit, to Eric, so that the sound matched a bit better. I used a little less drive. I think Eric uses just the sheer volume of the amp to get his drive out of it, so I think when he goes quiet he stays clean, and then as he gets louder it gets, you know, that’s how he achieves drive. So I had to slightly modify my sound, I felt, to kind of work with his amp.

But it was great to play together. I had such a great, great time, and he’s a very generous musician inasmuch as he was quite happy to let me play solos on his songs that he plays. It was a fantastic experience.


FN: Lots of clean, grooving Strat® sounds on Nine Lives—do you come up with a part like the one that leads off “Raging Sea” and give it to Jose Neto, or do you have him do his own thing?
SW: No. He’s a great soloist and a very good improviser. We actually wrote the song together. He came up with a group of lyrics, and then we put some melodies and changes to it, and then space for him to do a solo. And he just came right up with the solo; it is actually a solo on a Stratocaster.


FN: You mention on the DVD that accompanies Nine Lives that the album is more a collection of “short stories rather than a novel.” Is that deliberate, or did it just turn out that way as you were writing?
SW: I suppose it came out that way because many of the songs were written separately. As a matter of fact, they do cover some of the same themes, in different songs, but they were written as separate entities. I was writing with Jose Neto, and a new lyric writer I’ve been working with called Peter Godwin, and we’d been working on these songs separately really, as different entities. And then when we came to put them all together, they seemed to have a certain continuity with each other although they were quite separate songs. And that was one of the reasons behind calling the album Nine Lives—because the songs seemed to have lives of their own.