Listen Without Prejudice, Volume 1

<b>100 Best Albums</b> After proving the depth, scope and maturity of his songwriting with an unassailable debut, George Michael released his second solo album, which feels like a pointed gear change. True, there is “Freedom! ’90”, a bright, piano-driven single designed to deftly skewer both the emerging age of music video culture and Michael’s own conflict about the way the <i>Faith</i> era had almost turned him into a piece of caricatured public property. Nonetheless, the pervading mood of <i>Listen Without Prejudice</i> is one of subtlety, political consciousness and emotional desolation. Woodwinds evoke sparse battlefields (“Mothers Pride”), echo adds ghostly desperation (most notably on the spine-tingling Stevie Wonder cover, “They Won’t Go When I Go”) and windblown acoustic guitar nods to folk (“Something to Save”). Crowned by the grand, Lennon-ian sweep of “Praying for Time”, it is a quietly radical, deeply affecting creative progression—the sound of an artist retreating from pop’s synth-driven orthodoxy into something touched by timelessness, profundity and, in almost every sense, real soul.