Tracks 6, 7, 8 and 9 from The Dream Weaver (1975)

Tracks 10, 11 and 12 from The Light Of Smiles (1977)

I will say, I knew one Gary Wright deep cut before I worked on this playlist. "Can't Find The Judge" was sampled on "No More Talk," which was the opening track on my T.I. deep album cuts playlist, and both those songs kick ass. So I knew that The Dream Weaver, by far Wright's most successful album, had at least one great song beyond the two songs everybody knows. 

Gary Wright was American, but moved to London in the late '60s when it was the center of the pop universe. He was an on-and-off member of the British blues band Spooky Tooth and not their frontman, but Wright was the group's primary songwriter on their most popular albums. In the early '70s, he became good friends with George Harrison and fell in with that post-Beatles crowd, playing keyboards all over Harrison's first few solo albums well as hits by Ringo Starr and Harry Nilsson. 

Gary Wright's first two solo albums made no commercial impact, despite the second one Footprint being made with basically the same group of musicians as All Things Must Pass, including George Harrison, a year after that was the biggest album in the world. Those records are pretty good, but pretty guitar-driven and different from Wright's later work outside of the piano ballad "Love To Survive," which influenced some of Harrison's solo work. Manfred Mann's Earth Band also covered "Give Me The Good Earth." Wright made a third album soon after, Ring of Changes, that his label shelved (it was eventually released in 2016). 

The Dream Weaver was known at the time as one of the first synthesizer-driven rock albums (with guitar on only one track), and it's a pretty cool-sounding record. Legendary session drummer Jim Keltner does great stuff on both Footprint and The Dream Weaver. As someone who's made a few rock albums with synths and live drums, it's interesting to listen to one of the first really successful albums made that way. I think he's kind of like Peter Frampton: a talented musician with a pleasant voice who didn't quite have it in him to be an all-time great artist, but got a few timeless songs out there and was briefly a big star. He's got some kind of dippy, very '70s songs, but I mostly was able to pick songs I really dug for this playlist. 

Wright definitely had some R&B influences ("Love Is Alive" even got some action on the R&B charts and was later covered by Chaka Khan). And sometimes his stuff reminds me of Music of My Mind-era Stevie Wonder, especially the Moog basslines on Touch And Gone. Wright never got close to repeating the success of The Dream Weaver, but he racked up a few hits up through '81, and over the last few decades he continued making solo records, occasionally reuniting Spooky Tooth, and touring with Ringo Starr.