Think About It... Higher Love?

I'm going back to the roots of this blog and doing a song analysis today, tying it in with estate planning, and, amazingly, hoping that this blog post in specific can bring the Word of God to some new folks.  Ready?

Ever since I was a kid, I have loved the Steve Winwood song "Higher Love" and I have always thought, throughout the years, that this song means more than a simple reading of the lyrics can accomplish.  

Here are the lyrics (credit to Steve Winwood), and a link to the music video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9olaIio3l8&feature=youtu.be

Think about it, there must be higher love
Down in the heart or hidden in the stars above
Without it, life is 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, oh
Bring me a higher love
Where's that higher love I keep thinking of?

Worlds are turning, and we're just hanging on
Facing our fear and standing out there alone
A yearning and it's real to me
There must be someone who's feeling for me

{Hook}

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, oh
Bring me a higher love
Where's that higher love I keep thinking of?

Bring me a higher love
Bring me a higher love, oh
Bring me a higher love
A good kind of love, want a higher love

I will wait for it
I'm not too late for it
Until then, I'll sing my song
To cheer the night along

Bring it, oh

{Bridge}

I could light the night up with my soul on fire
I could make the sun shine from pure desire
Let me feel that love come over me
Let me feel how strong it could be

Oh

{Bridge }

Bring me a higher love
Bring me a higher love, oh
Bring me a higher love
Where's that higher love I keep thinking of?

Bring me a higher love
Bring me a higher love, oh bring me
Bring me a higher love, oh
Bring me a higher love

Bring me a higher love
Bring me a higher love, oh I said bring me
Bring me a higher love
Bring me a higher love

Bring me a higher love
Bring me a higher love, oh

MY THOUGHTS?

Now.  Lots of people thought this was a spiritual song, and I want to make the case that we could view Mr. Winwood's version (which won him a Grammy in 1986) was certainly an appeal to our more spiritual sensitivities.  This was obviously not at the top of my mind as an 11-year old in the mid 80s, I just liked the song and the video.  But read the lyrics!  What is the higher love?  It isnt that of a human lover, I would posit.  I think it is the love of God/Jesus Christ!  I mean, he is practically crying out for deeper meaning in his life, divine intervention, something.  We walk through this world, and there is nothing, life is wasted time, etc.  And he wants that higher purpose.  Well, there is no higher purpose than Jesus, right?  Does he realize that, or is he just blindly pleading for help?  A mystery.  Could this be considered a Christian song?  I think a lot more songs are out there in the pop world that are actually Christian songs than most people realize.  I believe this is one.  Can you picture it being sung in a church?  I can.  It helps me realize that I am not alone, in searching for more meaning in life.  God gives us meaning.  Further, look at Psalm 108:3/4 (NIV): 3I will praise you, Lord, among the nations;
I will sing of you among the peoples.
4For great is your love, higher than the heavens;
your faithfulness reaches to the skies.

Who has the highest love that we are all seeking?  God.

Nowadays, and the reason I write this blog today, there has been an updating of this song by someone other than Mr. Winwood.  Back in 1990, in Tokyo, Whitney Houston, in concert, did a cover of this song.  Here is footage from this concert.  The single was never included on any record.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbmiyLe2OnY

Evidently, this was only performed one time, and she was ill during this concert.  Notice the earring (a cross).  Notice the backing gospel-like choir.  Still think its not a Christian song?  Or at least, talking about God?

I found the above version by Ms. Houston due to my relentless searching on Sirius XM for some good music one day on my truck radio.  This "new song" came on by Whitney Houston and Kygo (evidently, a Swedish DJ) and I was hooked.  This DJ Kygo guy--hes pretty good--but Whitney Houston, who grew up in the church singing gospel music until she was discovered in the early 1980s, is the absolute star of the song.  And she finally gives this song the "weight" it deserves.  Gives it a little meaning.  Only one problem.  She's been dead for about 10 years!!!  How is this song possible?  

Thus we delve into estate planning.  Check out this article.  Its better than anything I could have written on the subject.  But before I sign off: let me just say--please consider making an estate plan today!  You never know what will happen to your intellectual or creative property after you have passed away.  In the case of Whitney Houston, the beneficiaries of her estate will benefit from her God-given talents years after her passing.  Think about those who you would leave behind.

The Murky Ethics of Posthumous MusicWith a new version of “Higher Love,” the EDM star Kygo reworks a 1990 Whitney Houston vocal into a pool-party jam both of its time and out of it.
Spencer Kornhaber
July 16, 2019

“Think about it,” Whitney Houston commands at the beginning of “Higher Love,” the single with the Norwegian DJ Kygo that’s making a splash in the songs-of-the-summer pool. Those lyrics make for a sharp, effective, dartlike opening. They also might double as an invitation to think about the song itself, which is the first instance of “new”—largely unheard by the public—Houston vocals being released since her death, in 2012. As music, “Higher Love” goes down as easily as a sweet blended cocktail, and it marks Houston’s first entry onto the Hot 100 since 2009. For anyone attuned to Houston’s career, life, and commercial afterlife, it’s a strange and telling document as well.


In its original form, recorded and co-written by Steve Winwood, “Higher Love” hit No. 1 and earned Winwood the Grammy for Record of the Year in 1986. Houston covered it at a concert in Tokyo in 1990 and recorded a version intended for her third full-length release, I’m Your Baby Tonight. It didn’t end up on the album. “When [producer] Narada Michael Walden sent me ‘Higher Love’ with the Whitney vocal, we didn’t want her being a cover artist at that time,” Clive Davis, the music exec who helped shepherd Houston’s career, told Rolling Stone. It was released only as a bonus single in Japan, and remained obscure and little-heard for decades.  
But seven years after Houston’s death from a drug-related accidental drowning, her name, image, and voice are set to stir again. In May, The New York Times reported that the executor of her estate, Houston’s sister-in-law Pat Houston, had decided that the time was right to begin marketing the late singer’s work. Plans for a Houston hologram tour had already been much publicized—in part because the CGI Houston who dueted with Christina Aguilera on The Voice in 2016 was, aesthetically, a bit freaky. “After closely viewing the performance, we decided the hologram was not ready to air,” Pat said back then. The fine-tuning process continues. “The hologram has taken precedence over everything,” she said in this year’s Times story.
Also in the works is an album of unreleased material, which may or may not end up having “Higher Love” on it. The posthumous release of Houston’s songs will be handled in large part by Primary Wave Music Publishing, which struck a $14 million deal with the estate to manage Houston’s assets in exchange for 50 percent ownership of its holdings. About the genesis of 2019’s version of “Higher Love,” a post on Primary Wave’s website says that one of the firm’s VPs, Seth Faber, “hatched the idea before the ink was dry on PW’s deal with the Houston estate.” In Rolling Stone, Pat Houston said, “The current cultural environment has been thirsty for something uplifting and inspiring. Who better to inspire than Whitney, the most exhilarating vocalist of all time?”
Read: Whitney Houston and the holographic hell to come
Houston’s vocals on “Higher Love” indeed are inspiring. Her phrasing moves from clipped haughtiness to gentle consideration; toward the end of the song, she does what she was born to do and belts. Watch the video of her performing the song in concert—her earring is in the shape of a cross and her backup vocalists sing in gospel intonations—and it becomes clear how much she picked up on the churchly implications of Winwood and the co-writer Will Jennings’s words (Jennings also co-wrote Whitney’s 1987 hit “Didn’t We Almost Have It All”). That opening line, “Think about it,” kicks off an argument worthy of theologians. Houston proceeds, “There must be higher love / Down in the heart or hidden in the stars above / Without it, life is a wasted time.”
It is, however, easy to miss such inflections of meaning in the context of the 2019 single, which is attributed to “Kygo X Whitney Houston.” Kygo is the quietly ubiquitous 27-year-old DJ who in the past five years has helped blend pulsating EDM with “tropical” influences and a whiff of Coldplay’s sentimentality. The results are the musical equivalent of an H&M pastel-floral romper, somehow both party-ready and wallpaper-like. The Houston estate reportedly selected him to rework “Higher Love” based on his remix of Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing.”
Kygo’s take on “Higher Love” offers a lesson in modern pop clichés. There’s the aqueous, bubbling-up intro. There’s the way all the expected production elements—dreamy marimba tones, chipper horns, drums that crash then lope, chopped-up and pitched-down vocals—pile up for a sense of acceleration through the verse and multi-section chorus. In the post-chorus, he does the common pop-EDM move of making it feel as though the main hook is a shoe that’s tumbling around in a dryer. “Need / need / higher love,” Houston now stammers, her articles snipped out and her melody ping-ponging about. Right before the second verse, there’s a noticeably long pause—very on-trend, too—and the roller coaster starts climbing again.
If Kygo’s formula is blandly familiar, it still pops with Houston’s vocals and the proven catchiness of Winwood’s original tune. “Higher Love” has only been out for a little more than a week, and I’ve heard it on commuter radio and in Wimbledon promos and at beach bars and pool parties. It debuted at No. 63 on the Billboard Hot 100—not the most impressive placing, but Houston’s first song to debut on that chart in 10 years—and No. 2 on the Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart, which speaks more to its intended fate.
Kygo debuted the song live at Pride in New York City, and “Higher Love” unmistakably is aiming for high-energy, thump-thumping queer mega-clubs, the playlists of which are historically testing grounds for high-energy, thump-thumping mega-clubs of all sorts. This is an environment Houston’s voice is well suited to. Pride-month dance floors were already ringing out with the likes of “I Want to Dance With Somebody” and “It’s Not Right but It’s Okay”—in many cases in remixes that place Houston’s vocals in glittering, four-on-the-floor epics. That the estate and Primary Wave chose the EDM sound for Houston’s so-called comeback single is a sign that they understand her everlasting appeal in the dance-music context.
Read: Whitney Houston and the persistent perils of the mainstream
But the choice also raises the memory of tensions that ran throughout her career. Houston always walked aesthetic tightropes, performing a balancing act involving genre, race, spirituality, and questions of creative agency. After being marketed in the ’80s as a “crossover” star—as in, palatable to white people—Houston faced backlash from some black listeners that culminated in her being booed at the 1989 Soul Train Music Awards. She then tried to push the sound of her next album, I’m Your Baby Tonight, more in the direction of R&B. The “Higher Love” cover was recorded in this period. While the Winwood original may read as consummately “white” music (though Chaka Khan, Houston’s friend, sang on it), the version Houston performed in Japan came with a hint of New Jack Swing sound. That sound has been replaced by one that, to the extent it’s affiliated with any one group, is affiliated with Scandinavians who command nightclub residencies in Las Vegas.
Does this recontextualizing of her vocals do a disservice to Houston’s legacy, or does it honor her by getting audiences dancing along to her once more? Posthumously released music typically starts in ethically murky territory—who can say how an artist wanted unfinished or unheard recordings used?—but it’s most dubious when there’s a sense that scraps are being repurposed to chase new trends. This summer’s “Higher Love” doesn’t feel too ghoulish, though, as Kygo’s work here has more the feel of a remix than a new song, and it’s resonating with audiences who do genuinely love Houston. Still, as the kickoff to the next phase of repurposing the singer’s work, it raises a question that was familiar throughout Houston’s life: Who’s in control, and what would Whitney want?
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Spencer Kornhaber is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers pop culture and music.