Covered: Will Jennings, Volume 1: 1975-1987

Here's more music for my "Covered" series highlighting excellent songwriters. I'm trying to get to the older stuff before moving to newer stuff, so this one was not the one I planned to post next. But I recently stumbled across the fact that Will Jennings died in September 2024, and it's now June 2025, so this is a belated post to mark his passing. I found enough music for two volumes; this is the first one.

Will Jennings was born and raised in Texas. After getting bachelor's and master's degrees, starting in the late 1960s, he worked for a few years as a professor of English. Then in 1971, he got the songwriting bug. He moved to Nashville, Tennessee and tried to become a professional songwriter. It took a few years before he had much success, but by the end of the 1970s, he was in high demand. His songwriting strength was his lyric writing, though he could write music as well. No doubt, his experience as an English professor helped with that.

Jennings almost always co-wrote songs. He developed good relationships with some musicians, leading to many years of collaborations. A key example is Steve Winwood. While Winwood found success with the band Traffic in the late 1960s and 1970s, he co-wrote the vast majority of his songs then with band member Jim Capaldi, with Winwood generally writing the music and Capaldi the lyrics. So when Winwood started his solo career in the late 1970s, he needed a new songwriting partner. He didn't write that many songs with Jennings, but a big percentage of them turned out to be hits. There are more of them in Volume 2. He also collaborated a lot with B.B. King and Rodney Crowell, amongst others. 

Here's his Wikipedia entry:

Will Jennings - Wikipedia 

I'm pretty sure all of the songs here are the original versions, with the vast majority of them being hits. In this time period, he co-wrote five songs which were Number One hits in the U.S.: "Looks like We Made It," "Up Where We Belong," "Higher Love," "Back in the High Life Again," and "Didn't We Almost Have It All."

This album is an hour and one minute long. 

01 Somewhere in the Night (Helen Reddy)
02 Feelins' (Conway Twitty & Loretta Lynn)
03 Looks like We Made It (Barry Manilow)
04 Street Life (Crusaders with Randy Crawford)
05 I'll Never Love This Way Again (Dionne Warwick)
06 Better Not Look Down (B.B. King)
07 While You See a Chance (Steve Winwood)
08 One Day I'll Fly Away (Randy Crawford)
09 Valerie (Steve Winwood)
10 Never Make a Move Too Soon (Crusaders & B.B. King)
11 Up Where We Belong (Joe Cocker & Jennifer Warnes)
12 Higher Love (Steve Winwood)
13 Finer Things (Steve Winwood)
14 Didn't We Almost Have It All (Whitney Houston)
15 Back in the High Life Again (Steve Winwood) 

https://pixeldrain.com/u/CNYC7Jdh

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/prlFwIDwbU4DlcW/file

I don't know when the cover photo is from exactly, but he looks younger than the one I chose for the second volume. In the full photo, he's holding an Academy Award in his hands. He won two Academy Awards in his career, one for "Up Where We Belong" in 1982 and the other for "My Heart Will Go On" in 1997, so this is very likely to be from 1982.