There Ain't No Point in Moving On Until You've Got Some Place to Go

In the fall of 1990, I was in my first semester of college, just a couple weeks in, when George Michael released Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1. Having loved his hugely successful previous album Faith, I walked to Finders Records in downtown Bowling Green, Ohio, to buy his new release on cassette tape as soon as it came out, and I made it back to my dorm room with just enough time to listen to the entire tape before heading off to the Introduction to Popular Culture class I was taking. I remember walking to class after listening to the album, completely enamored with what I had just heard. It was neither the first nor the last time I had responded like that to George Michael's work. In 1988, before "One More Try" was released as a single from Faith, I listened to the song so much that the first time I heard it on the radio and realized it had been released as a single, I told the first people I saw -- some classmates at my high school who likely couldn't have cared less -- how excited I was. Eight years later, in 1996, from the first time I heard it, I loved the feel of "Fastlove," and I still play it occasionally for no other reason than to groove to it. Still, my memory today returns to Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 because (a) it contains the song that a few years after its release I would come to view as Michael's best song ("Freedom") and (b) because news of his death takes me back to falling in love almost instantly to the last song on the album, "Waiting (Reprise)," and listening to it over and over again just after its release.

To borrow a line from "Waiting (Reprise)," George, "I guess there's a road without you." It's a road, though, that the world is walking much too soon.