Earth, Wind & Fire’s Spirit Album (50th Anniversary)

Earth, Wind & Fire’s 1976 release, Spirit, was released 50 years ago.

Maurice:
Spirit may or may not have been our best record commercially, but it was by far our most important one, solidifying Earth, Wind & Fire as musical and spiritual progressives. It was the right album at the right time and a foundational building block in our story, with the perfect blend of black church and mystical spiritual optimism. Another great thing about Spirit is that it established a black masculinity for the band that was different than the one generally expressed in public.

I had been carrying a mental picture for a long time that I couldn’t let go of: an album cover with the band dressed in white, standing, eyes closed, in front of three huge white pyramids – meditative and spiritually Eastern in flavor. With the addition of some Sufi-style placing of the arms, this became the album cover for Spirit, another attempt to broaden our audience and appeal to a wider view of consciousness.

– Maurice White. My Life With Earth, Wind & Fire, by Maurice White with Herb Powell, 2016.