Santana-Inner Secrets (1978)

This album marks the beginning of a stage in which Carlos Santana begins to disassociate himself a little from the influences of Jazz, Blues and Latin elements to start creating something more oriented towards classic Rock. However, this album was disappointing for many fans.
Nonetheless, this album held up very well on the charts due to some of its singles like "Open Invitation" or the fantastic "One Chain (Don’t make no prison)", longer than any other Santana album since 1971.
But in addition to these two relevant and magnificent themes, Santana dared to cover several sixties classics such as the inaugural "Dealer", by the mythical Traffic and the eternal "Well all right" by the Blind Faith, thus reviving the spirit of Steve Winwood, much forgotten by that times.
In the rest of the album Santana's guitar recovers the edge for "Open invitation", or the instrumental "Life is a lady" where it delves into those long and gimmicky notes of the house (maybe Camel had it in mind for six more years late writing "Stationary traveler") plus great "The facts of love" like "Wham!" soft keyboards border to recover the tropical and Afro-Cuban pulse. And in the end it turns out that the disc buried in personal and collective memory resists, from that evocative gregarious black and white cover, over the years.
Perhaps this was one of his last great albums since during the following decade Carlos Santana continually skirted the disaster with albums that never came to stand out in a special way, despite their undeniable quality.
There is something intriguing, really, the career of this musician, capable of starting with four fabulous albums (not only "Abraxas", the most famous; or the conceptual spirituality of "Caravanserai", so often undervalued), and then lose himself in infinite meanders.