Tag Archives: Marvin Gaye

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Song of the Day #6,131: ‘I Want You’ – Marvin Gaye

Concluding my look at the albums of 1976…

The final 1976 album I listened to was Marvin Gaye’s I Want You, the singer-songwriter’s 13th studio album. This record followed 1971’s What’s Going On and 1973’s Let’s Get It On, two of Gaye’s most successful albums, and was viewed at the time as a letdown.

I Want You, co-written and co-produced by Gaye with Leon Ware, shifted his sound a little more toward disco. It also doubled down on the sexual themes of Let’s Get It On — this is an excessively horny album.

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Song of the Day #4,126: ‘You Sure Love to Ball’ – Marvin Gaye

Our next 1973 album comes courtesy of Mr. Marvin Gaye, who followed up his seminal 1971 political album with one of the greatest albums ever made about sex: Let’s Get It On.

Gaye grew up physically and emotionally abused by his minister father, who instilled in the young man a deeply troublesome view of sex that contributed to bouts of impotence. Not exactly the mental image you get of the man who sang ‘Let’s Get It On’ and the rest of the slow-funk love jams featured on this album.

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Song of the Day #4,058: ‘Got to Give It Up’ – Marvin Gaye

Another famous copyright infringement case is far less clear-cut and far more troubling than the ‘My Sweet Lord’ example — the claim that Robin Thicke’s 2013 ‘Blurred Lines’ borrows too heavily from Marvin Gaye’s ‘Got to Give It Up.’

The backstory here is a strange one, and one with a lot of potential to shake up the music industry. That’s because ‘Blurred Lines’ didn’t copy the melody of the Gaye song or sample it directly, but rather mirrored the general mood and feel of the track.

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Song of the Day #3,706: ‘Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)’ – Marvin Gaye

My top ten 1971 albums represent some of the best music of the whole era, but that year was loaded enough to produce even more albums worth mentioning.

This week, I’ll feature tracks from five celebrated 1971 albums I don’t know very well. Some I’ve heard before, some I’m hearing for the very first time. They might not have cracked my own top ten list, but they all help round out the musical portrait of 1971.

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Song of the Day #387: ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’ – Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell

marvtamA little background, courtesy of Wikipedia:

The original 1967 version of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” was a top twenty hit. According to record producers, Terrell was a little nervous and intimidated during recording because she hadn’t rehearsed the lyrics. Terrell recorded her vocals alone with producers Harvey Fuqua and Johnny Bristol, who added Gaye’s vocal at a later date.[1] “Ain’t No Mountain” peaked at number nineteen on the Billboard pop charts, and went to number three on the R&B charts.

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