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Let's Get It On

Soul / R&B / Singer-songwriter soul · 1973

Let's Get It On

Marvin Gaye

Why listen

An invitation and a call across distance reveal different forms of intimacy within eight carefully placed songs.

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Tracks · previews

English editorial edition

Album story

The opening of Let’s Get It On asks someone closer, but the entire album does not move in one direction. Distant Lover opens a different distance, while Just to Keep You Satisfied leaves an ending unlike the beginning. Eight songs allow the voice to approach, hesitate and reconsider.

Marvin Gaye’s 1973 album groups his work with Ed Townsend on the first side. Some material on the second began in earlier Detroit sessions, so this was not simply one uninterrupted recording event. What’s Going On offers a useful comparison, but Trouble Man came between the two releases. Rather than a single abrupt turn from society to romance, consider how material from several working periods became a concise programme.

Returning to the opening proposition

The title song leads through Please Don’t Stay and If I Should Die Tonight before Keep Gettin’ It On brings the opening proposition back. At the original first side’s end, the record looks toward its beginning. The fourth track is not an appended duplicate merely because its name resembles the first. The intervening songs change the context in which that return arrives. Hearing the first four together gives the familiar hit a relationship beyond its independent success.

Several places for one voice

Discussing the title track, engineer Art Stewart described his practice of putting drums on three tracks and balancing them while recording. Lead and background vocals then occupy that organised space. Follow only the lead and the song can seem like one person speaking directly; include the harmonies and the statement acquires responses around it. This testimony concerns the title track, not a universal method for every song. It suggests listening for what remains after a lead phrase has passed.

Distance after a short reunion

Come Get To This is the shortest track here, at roughly two minutes forty-two seconds. Distant Lover follows with a longer span. Their adjacency makes the second side more than one mood maintained at one scale. You Sure Love To Ball and the final song extend its range of expectation, absence and reflection. Listen again to the transition from the fifth song to the sixth, then return to the opening after the conclusion. The same invitation may now carry different weight.

The album through its tracks

Follow the opening through its fourth-track return, then compare Come Get To This with Distant Lover.

  1. Let’s Get It On

    Gaye and Ed Townsend’s opening song is selected in its approximately four-minute-fifty-four-second album form, rather than the shorter single edit or a later remix. After following a lead phrase, notice where the supporting voices enter. Intimacy depends on more than putting one singer at the front. Stewart described using three drum tracks and balancing them during recording, a concrete example of his engineering practice. Start with the relationship between lead and response instead of assigning every instrumental sound to a particular musician. This is the 2003 remaster, with its disclosed timing difference from the Qobuz comparison. Continue through Keep Gettin’ It On to hear the opening proposition return.

    Reference · Mix: Art Stewart and Harry Weinger on the title-track recording

  2. Distant Lover

    The sixth song is the approximately four-minute-seventeen-second studio album recording, not a later concert performance. Its writers are Gaye, Gwen Gordy Fuqua and Sandra Greene, distinguishing it from the Townsend collaborations on the first side. Coming after the brief Come Get To This, it enlarges the time the record spends in one scene. The title addresses someone at a distance, unlike the opening’s close invitation. Follow the waits between phrases and the places filled by supporting voices to hear intimacy expressed from another position. No complete biographical decoding is required. Pairing these songs reveals how the same album can call toward another person from markedly different emotional and musical distances.

    Reference · Qobuz / Motown: eight-track programme and credits

Listen next

Return to What’s Going On and compare how layered voices serve intimate appeals and questions addressed to society.

What's Going On ↗
References & editorial note

Written for English readers. Album facts are referenced below; listening suggestions are editorial interpretations. AI-assisted editorial review; not independently human-reviewed.