Eric Clapton was never out to chase stardom when he picked up a guitar. He wanted to spread the gospel of blues, which meant playing the best guitar whenever he recorded. But now and again, those handful of pop tunes would creep into his discography.
Then again, none of ‘Slowhand’s pop tunes were meant to be mainstream hits. ‘Tears in Heaven’ is a fantastic song, but it’s typically seen as musical therapy for Clapton when he paid tribute to his late son, and even when ‘Wonderful Tonight’ comes on the radio, people are hearing the vulnerable side of Clapton that he doesn’t tend to show. Because whenever he is in his element, he will most likely let his guitar do the talking and throw in a handful of lyrics here and there.
Even on some of the best albums he ever made, Clapton isn’t doing most of the heavy lifting in the vocal department. He was always a co-vocalist with Jack Bruce whenever he worked with Cream, and even though he had some stellar moments in the power-trio, he wouldn’t even write his first proper song by himself until he left to form Blind Faith and recorded ‘Presence of the Lord’.
There are many moments when Clapton may have felt a bit out of touch with the rest of the rock world, but he never stopped listening to what else was going on. Behind the Sun works so well as a Clapton album because of his willingness to work with someone like Phil Collins. Despite having some dated production, the Genesis frontman always looked out for the guitar legend whenever he performed with him.
But with the 1990s bringing even newer styles to the table, Clapton wanted to move in a different direction after Unplugged. The blues had shifted to the world of R&B, and when listening to Babyface for the first time, Clapton knew he would have been a fool not to work with him on a version of the song ‘Change the World’.
It’s not the first collaboration that most would think of when looking at Clapton’s pedigree, but the guitar genius was infatuated with what Babyface could do, saying, “I was thinking, ‘this is a guy who’s in the R&B world, he’s a producer and yet he knows how to get that minimal thing and make a small sound really powerful.’ When I heard the song, I put it on in my car and was driving around listening to it about 200 times. I just knew it was a hit. I’m the guy that used to hate the idea of pop songs and I was so against that. But when the music is that good, I start to become okay about it.”
That wasn’t even the first time Clapton got the itch for R&B music, either. Even though he was still knee-deep in blues by the end of the 1990s, he was still interested in the new school enough to see what people like D’Angelo were doing, being among the first to hear his album Voodoo when it was being worked on.
Seeing Clapton go down this road might have been a little strange for people who knew him as one of the heaviest players of all time, but if they had a problem with his choices, they forgot the number-one rule of his music. Clapton could come across some of the strangest collaborators he ever worked with, but anything could get done if they spoke the same language of the blues.
