This Steve Winwood Hit Was Called a “Modern Hymn” by the Songwriter

In 1986, Steve Winwood scored his first No.1 single in the United States, with “Higher Love”. Prior to “Higher Love”, Winwood had several other hits, including “While You See A Chance”, “Still In The Game”, and “Valerie”. But it’s “Higher Love” that became Winwood’s first single to reach the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

Written by Winwood and Will Jennings, “Higher Love” is on Winwood’s fourth studio album, Back In The High Life. A song of redemption, “Higher Love” says, “Think about it, there must be higher love / Down in the heart or hidden in the stars above / Without it, life is a wasted time / Look inside your heart, I’ll look inside mine / Things look so bad everywhere / In this whole world, what is fair? / We walk blind, and we try to see / Falling behind in what could be / Bring me a higher love / Bring me a higher love / Bring me a higher love / Where’s that higher love I keep thinking of.”

The lyrics came largely from Jennings, who expresses his spiritual reflections in “Higher Love”.

“I was born in East Texas,” Jennings tells Songfacts. “And my mother and father’s families were from Arkansas, and the generations before were from the Deep South. My father’s father was a Methodist preacher, a circuit rider, in Arkansas. My earliest memories are of the music in church, and of my aunts and uncles singing the beautiful old hymns. ‘Higher Love’ is a generation past that, when things were not so much taken for granted, so that one has to plea, ‘Bring me a higher love,’ and the lines are all trying to explain why there must be higher love. A modern hymn, you might call it.”

What Steve Winwood Says About Songwriting

Winwood is the writer behind several of his hits, including “Back In The High Life Again”, his second No. 1 hit, and “Roll With It”, among others. But surprisingly, Winwood, who was also part of several bands, including Traffic and Blind Faith, says he isn’t overly talented as a songwriter.

“I’m not enormously prolific,” Winwood claims. “Sometimes I have to work a bit hard to write things, and sometimes things come very quickly. In Traffic, we were musicians – and first and foremost we wanted to jam. But because at the time we were being played on the radio and had a record deal, we needed to write songs of a certain length.”

“So that became the first reason we wrote songs: as a vehicle to play music,” he adds. “With songwriters, it’s the other way ‘round; they write because that’s what they do.”

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