Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1

Sessions began in July 1989 at producer Chris Porter's house near Guildford before moving to Metropolis Studios in Chiswick, London. Tony Parsons has said it was first planned as a double album, but by late September 1989 the plan had become two separate albums. Michael produced and arranged every track, as on Faith. Waiting for That Day carries a sample of the Funky Drummer break, which Freedom! '90 also uses, and its last line is borrowed from the Rolling Stones' You Can't Always Get What You Want, so Jagger and Richards share the writing credit. The cover is a cropped 1940 Weegee photograph, Crowd at Coney Island.

It entered the UK chart at number one, spent 88 weeks on it and was certified four-times platinum. In the US it entered at 22, peaked at number two and has sold about eight million copies worldwide. Praying for Time, Waiting for That Day, Freedom! '90, Heal the Pain and Cowboys and Angels were released as singles in the UK. The album won Best British Album at the 1991 Brit Awards.

Reception

Rolling Stone's James Hunter said it generally succeeded in its effort to establish Michael's seriousness. Robert Christgau dismissed it as "cocktail music". Writing in Pitchfork in 2017, Alfred Soto called it a mostly acoustic, bossa nova-inflected record and judged Michael's insistence on releasing Praying for Time as brave as Fleetwood Mac's sending Tusk to radio. The album appears in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. A reissue on 20 October 2017 added Michael's MTV Unplugged concert and went to number one in the UK, 27 years after the original.