Steve Winwood has always thrown plenty of ingredients into his music. Take his unique, timeless voice -- which, by the way, is sounding better than ever -- his longtime love of R&B, some contemporary soul grooves, a couple of spiritual ballads and his formidable experience as a rock heavyweight, put them all together and you arrive at Junction Seven.
"There's a freedom in Traffic. There's a kind of roughness and something that I suppose is some kind of catalyst that Jim gives to me and maybe I give to him,'' Winwood said. "It makes us work in a different way. It's a different thing, being in a group. It gives you another kind of freedom and another environment.''
"The cottage thing came about for practical reasons really," Winwood reminisces. "We were staying in a house in London and whenever we wanted to play, the neighbors would be banging on the walls. We wanted somewhere where we could just ply whenever we wanted. We found this cottage in the Berkshire Downs. It was a big estate with a sort of hovel for the gamekeeper, which was what we rented. Actually, it was a beautiful place and we set up a sort of mud stage where we could just play in the open air. It was very cut off with no road to it, just a track, and there were only about 3 weeks in the year when you could get a car up there. The rest of the time it was just a quagmire."
"I'm going through a Traffic phase right now," Winwood says by phone from his home in Nashville. "For a while, I thought that Traffic was eccentric, but when I listen to it now I think it had a great deal of substance. I have recently realized that much of my solo work is a continuation of what I did with Traffic."