I don’t think I’d ever heard of Steve Winwood until this song smacked the airwaves in the face in the mid-eighties. This was back before Google and the days of instant gratification with regards to finding information about a song or artist, but the first time I’d heard this song I remembered thinking, 'Holy Shit, that’s Chaka Khan singing background vocals!' But back in those days we had MTV which actually played music (can you even imagine?), and it was then that Mark Goodman and Martha Quin explained to me that Steve Winwood was formerly known as Little Stevie Winwood and he was some kind of late-sixties/early-seventies childhood musical prodigy, and that’s also when it was revealed to me that I was, in fact, correct about Chaka as, there she was in the video! And I’ll be a motherfucker, that’s also Nile Rodgers playing rhythm guitar!!! Well, whatever. Higher Love was an amazing song in 1986 and it still is today, so much so that it’s currently being covered as a dance song by the late, beautiful Whitney Houston.
From the historical writing archive. Original date: November 4, 2019. Recovered from local source material; editorial review is still in progress.