Older

George Michael released Older on 13 May 1996, his third solo studio album and the first record he made after a five-and-a-half-year fight with Sony Music. He had accused the label of treating him as a commodity, and the dispute kept him off the release schedule from 1990's Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 until the matter was settled. Virgin Records issued the album in Europe through Michael's own Aegean imprint. The American edition arrived a day later and carried a footnote for the industry: it was the first album released on DreamWorks Records, the label founded by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen.

The record moves at a deliberate pace. Where his earlier solo work leaned on bright pop hooks, Older settles into downtempo soul and quiet-storm R&B, with jazz-inflected chord voicings and running times that stretch past five and six minutes on most tracks. Michael wrote and produced the material himself, working with David Austin as a co-writer on several songs. The lyrics circle around adult subjects: grief, fidelity, the aftermath of affairs, and the uneasy distance between who a person was and who he has become.

Two songs carry the album's emotional weight. "Jesus to a Child" was written for Anselmo Feleppa, Michael's partner, who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1993, and it opens the record at nearly seven minutes. "You Have Been Loved," placed near the end, addresses the same loss from a different angle. Between them sit the singles that drove the campaign, including "Fastlove" and "Spinning the Wheel."

Commercially the album worked hardest in Britain and continental Europe, where it reached the top of the albums chart. Its singles run became a talking point in the UK: six releases that each landed in the top three over roughly two years, a streak no other act had managed at the time. Sales were strong enough to justify an expanded reissue, Older & Upper, which appeared in 1997 with remixes and bonus tracks. [edit]