Santana - Supernatural poll

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Defend the indefensible: Santana's "Supernatural"

I know I promised two female artist in a row but decided to expand this block. I know this isn't the most popular block of records for ILM but going to extend this until Thanksgiving. So I'm adding two more and this is one of those.

Thoroughly enjoying these threads, Bee OK.

Smooth will win, so I’m going to throw a vote to the underrated Put Your Lights On.

“Maria Maria” is a hot jam imo

This album is super catchy, no wonder it has sold a shit load of copies.

a long long time ago i was kayaking in lake union with my then-girlfriend. around sunset, this white yacht storms past us, soaking us in its wake, blasting "smooth" while all these white wine drinkers cackle maniacally at us.

"One Fine Morning" from the expanded deluxe edition reissue.

i had this album growing up, unfortunately i didn't really like any of it aside from the two big singles and "put your lights on". my fav between the three would probably change day-to-day but today i will vote "put your lights on" bc i was doing guitar lessons at the time and had my teacher teach me how to play it

Somehow never actually heard this thing, despite the ubiquity of its hits. The 75-minute run time is a little intimidating, but I'm gonna give it a go.

i would read one of those oral histories of this album way before i actually listened to the thing.

all of these songs being well over 4 minutes is crazy to me.

that last track with eric clapton is 12 fucking minutes? hahaha yikes

yeah two tracks in and already the song lengths are a HUGE problem. but, gotta be honest, it's at least got more oomph than Two Against Nature, which I also tried out recently and have not really been able to remember anything about after 2-3 full listens. and Santana's playing and the general slickness/punchiness of the production is a reasonable through-line uniting these exercises. "(Da Le) Yaleo" was a nice curtain-raising workout.

not much can really save Dave Matthews in horny mode. and hmm. haven't heard "Put Your Lights On" since its brief moment of radio airplay, but it's never disappeared from my memory after my college roommate would sing the title, while driving, at other cars whose lights needed to be on. pretty boring song though. i'm getting a lot of whiffs of The Carnival here - similar effort at covering a lot of genre territory with guest stars, and I want to say a similar production approach when it comes to the live-band material.

"Smooth" remains an absolute hook machine. Thomas's cheese is obviously clownable, but his urgent, mush-mouthed emoting is a good foil for the potentially too-"smooth" backing track, just as it was for Matchbox 20's midtempo pop-rock. Unlike Matthews and Everlast, he rises to the same energy level as Santana's playing, and isn't afraid of going all-in on the big moments. It's a fun song, and it moves forward.

"Do You Like The Way" is a nice slice of polished big-budget R&B, but feels centerless - Santana disappears for whole minutes at a time, and both Lauryn Hill and Cee-Lo feel pasted-in. They should be playing off of each other, or off the guitar, but it really conveys the feeling of an all-star track where nobody was ever in the same room at the same time. It sounds good enough that this doesn't really matter, kinda like the in-between tracks on What's Going On or Shaft, both of which I can imagine being on Santana's mind.

>> The 75-minute run time is a little intimidating

You ain't kidding. I wrote about it for its 20th anniversary, and getting through it was a fucking slog.

I should set out the terms of my Santana fandom before we really dive in. I like all the band's work, and the albums Carlos Santana put out under his own name, from 1969's self-titled debut through 1974's Borboletta. The albums I love the most, though, are the weird ones he made in a flurry of spiritually inspired madness in 1972 and 1973: Caravanserai, Welcome, the live Lotus, and his collaborations with John McLaughlin (Love Devotion Surrender) and Alice Coltrane (Illuminations). Those were the years when he cut his hair, wore all white, and took the Sanskrit name "Devadip" (which he reportedly asked the band and crew to use when speaking to him). From the mid '70s on, I kinda lose interest. The only time I ever saw Santana live was in September 1988, on the 20th anniversary Viva Santana! tour -- he had reunited with several ex-band members, including keyboardist/vocalist Gregg Rolie, percussionists Armando Peraza and José "Chepito" Areas, and drummer Michael Shrieve, and had former Weather Report bassist Alphonso Johnson in the group. It was a good enough show; I remember it being long, and mostly instrumental. And as last week's interview reveals, I think his new album Africa Speaks is great, one of his strongest efforts in years.

So the Santana heard on Supernatural is not my Santana, to say the least. Until I decided to write this piece, I'd never heard the whole album. And when I did sit down and listen to it -- well, the first thing I'll say is, if you're planning on trying it yourself, block out some time. This was a CD released in 1999, and they used the whole goddamn thing: 74 minutes, 14 tracks, eight of which feature guests. When I interviewed Santana, he told me the story of how it was made: Basically, he extracted himself from an existing contract with Polygram Records so he could sign with Clive Davis' Arista label and make a big pop record, and in his words, "Clive said to me, 'I saw you live and your energy is incredible. However, I want to know, do you have the willingness to allow discipline to come to the studio and do the thing that you do live in the studio? I'll bring seven songs and you bring seven songs.' And I said yes, of course. So he started calling everybody from Babyface to Eric Clapton to Lauryn Hill, Wyclef, Rob Thomas -- everybody that was on this album, and to my surprise everybody said yes, they wanted to write songs for me or with me. So it was basically Clive Davis who was the architect of the big picture, the grand design."

For that reason, Supernatural often sounds like a Now That's What I Call Music! compilation, with a little bit more space than usual granted to guitar solos and congas. "Put Your Lights On," with Everlast, sounds like a song from one of Everlast's gritty-depressed-guy albums; it's got a big boom-bap beat underneath the acoustic guitar that carries the melody, with Santana adding little flourishes behind the vocals, and halfway through, it dives straight into rap-metal, with a big chugging riff that could have been played by any knuckle-walker from Woodstock '99. "Love Of My Life," with Dave Matthews and Carter Beauford of the Dave Matthews Band, is a ballad inexplicably built on one of those excessively complex and yet still somehow energy-less "funk" rhythms that people like ... well, like Carter Beauford made hippies twirl in circles to in the 1990s. In the track's second half, the congas and timbales show up and things get a little more active, but the jam band vibe keeps things baggily earthbound.

"Maria Maria," the second single from the album, was produced by Wyclef, and it's so bad. Of course, he's on it, introducing Carlos Santana and the vocalists -- a duo named the Project G&B, who were never heard from again, for good reason -- and when the track actually gets started, the lyrics are stunningly lame; the Maria of the title "reminds me of a west side story, growing up in Spanish Harlem," but she also "fell in love in East LA, to the sounds of the guitar played by Carlos Santana." Yes, this song features the singer calling Santana out by name, twice. It was at this point that I honestly started to feel sorry for him, which should never be the case when you're talking about an album that went diamond.

FTR, I voted for "Corazón Espinado," the song with Maná.

"Maria Maria," another well-earned hit, and speak of the devil, here's Wyclef himself. There's a certain little shuffle to the track that makes it feel like a smoothed out version of "Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See." Today it's hard not to just think of "Wild Thoughts." But overall it's a nice groove, and makes a good case for the fusion being proffered between Santana's yearning licks and contemporary, hip-hop-infused R&B.

"Migra" is pretty cool, another nice setting for Santana's playing, and refreshingly direct as a political statement --- almost shockingly so in this laid-back adult-contemporary context. Something about the groove does make it feel like the intro to a song that never arrives, or the "let's catch our breath" breakdown in the middle of some other song they never wrote. 5:24 is also pushing it, tbh. But it's definitely in the "good" column.

"Corazón Espinado" starts up, and abruptly the album suddenly feels like it's out of ideas --- the first few seconds feel like they could be the beginning to either "Smooth" or "Maria Maria." I'm alarmed to realize that I'm on track 9 of 13 but there is still something like 32 minutes left of this album.

I do like the "We Are The World" quality here, the of-the-moment gamble of an "all-star" lineup, where there's no telling whether Everlast and Eagle Eye Cherry will become definitive talents of their era, or basically one-hit wonders whose one hits peaked just in time for them to get one of those Clive Davis phone calls. I mean, i don't think it makes the songs any better, but it's more interesting than the version where those slots are filled out by, like Sting, Melissa Etheridge, Dave Grohl, and Whitney Houston.

"Wishing It Was" is classic 90s late-album filler, guarantee I won't remember this in ten minutes. The bouncy little acoustic guitar riff at the core of it is really familiar though - there's some big obvious song I know that uses that same basic trick, and that's going to bug me.

"El Farol" is just an extended variation on "Fly Me To The Moon," right? It's pleasant. Verging on Muzak but not bad.

Last couple tracks really made no impression at all to be honest

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Easy vote for Smooth but it's honestly not a miserable listen overall, and not quite the embarrassingly forced all-star blitz I'd always assumed. Okay, it's definitely wayyy too long, samey and a bit pointless, but besides the Dave Matthews and arguably the Eagle Eye numbers, there's little that's flat-out bad (allowing that I kind of wasn't paying attention towards the end).

Thanks for the review Doctor Casino and unperson. I agree with DC that those last two songs just seem to drift by and they're 20 minutes long combined. Surprised on how much I liked this album despite it not being in my wheelhouse. Voted for "Corazón Espinado" in the end.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.