Eric Clapton was never afraid of wearing his influences on his sleeve whenever he played.
He was always the professional troubadour carrying on the music of the legends that came before, and that meant paying tribute to them by throwing in the occasional Buddy Guy lick of reinterpreting the work of Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson. But even for a bluesy soul like him, not every one of his influences needed to be older than rock and roll itself.
As much as Clapton could be guilty of being a nostalgia act if he wanted to, he never stopped listening to what other people were doing. He had already reinvented himself after Cream disbanded by working with Derek and the Dominos, but when he began his official solo career, it wasn’t all about the blues anymore. He wanted to make the kind of records that singer-songwriters could be proud of, and that meant taking pieces from genres like reggae as well as rock and roll.
Then again, that did fans would know the difference between a labour of love and a song that was put together to follow trends. There are a few fantastic albums he released during the 1980s, but when listening to the production that Phil Collins put on a handful of his tunes, it’s hard not to hear the exact date and time at which they were recorded as well. He was starting to wane in some respects, but Unpluggedwas the kind of kick in the ass he really needed.
The rest of the world might have known him for being an excellent guitarist, but there was also another side of him that needed to branch out into more mellow territory. Not every rockstar may have been pleased, but it turned out that the greatest artists in the world of R&B seemed more in line with what Clapton was doing.
He was still every bit the guitar legend that he used to be, but he was beginning to come around to what the rest of the neo-soul scene was doing as well. There wasn’t too much of a difference between what he used to do and what an artist like D’Angelo was doing that decade, but when making his own records, he didn’t mind shouting out Usher as a primary inspiration when working on tunes from the album Pilgrim.
‘Slowhand’ even went so far as to claim that the title track of the record came from him wanting to make the best record that he could while taking bits and pieces from the modern world, saying, “We used drum loops … turned to technology when we ran out of things to do and needed a place to start. We would say something like, ‘Uh, well, um, have you heard the new Usher single?’ And from there we’d just copy the drum program, dicker with it and play along with it. That’s how the song ‘Pilgrim’ was born.”
While no one should expect nor hope for Clapton to do his own version of Confessions or anything, it’s not like there wasn’t some overlap there, either. The biggest names in R&B knew that the ‘B’ is incredibly important, and while Clapton was bound to be a strange fit on that sort of tune, he doesn’t feel that out of place because he’s not really trying to do the same bluesy runs that everyone else was doing.
He saved a lot of that kind of playing for when he took a solo, and while his voice was far weaker than what the biggest names in soul were doing, it was never at the expense of the song. Because at the end of the day, Clapton was in search of making any tune better, and that meant taking the crux of rock and roll and turning it into something with a bit more heartache.
