Pretty Birds Fly Away

Marvin Gaye : When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You

[Purchase]

On December 15, 1978 Marvin Gaye released Here My Dear, a brooding double album detailing the end of his decade-long marriage with Anna Gordy. At the time, critics and fans didn't know what to make of the sex symbol's bummer of a message. 

As part of the divorce settlement Gordy would receive Marvin's $305,000 advance and the first $295,000 he made from the album. At first Gaye wasn't planning on giving his best effort.

From the liner notes:

“I figured I’d just do a quickie record – nothing heavy, nothing even good. Why should I break my neck when Anna was going to wind up with the money anyway? But the more I lived with the notion of doing an album for Anna, the more it fascinated me. Besides, I owed the public my best effort. Finally, I did the record out of deep passion. It became a compulsion. I had to free myself of Anna, and I saw this as the way. All those depositions and hearings, all those accusations and lies – I knew I’d explode if I didn’t get all that junk out of me. So I had Art (Gaye’s engineer Art Stewart) open up the mikes. I sang and sang until I drained myself of everything I lived through. That took me three months, but then I held back the album for over a year. I was afraid to let it go.”

The album was deleted within a few years. Today it is considered one of Gaye's masterpieces.

More from Robert Christgau:

The brightness of the disco remix Motown has made available on "A Funky Space Reincarnation" is a vivid reminder of how pathologically laid back Gaye is striving to be. I mean, seventy minutes of pop music with nary a melody line almost qualifies as a tour de force, and the third side barely escapes the turntable at all. Yet this is a fascinating, playable album. Its confessional ranges from naked poetry ("Somebody tell me please/Why do I have to pay attorney fees?" is a modernist trope that ranks with any of Elvis Costello's) to rank jive, because Gaye's self-involvement is so open and unmediated, guileless even at its most insincere, it retains unusual documentary charm. And within the sweet, quiet, seductive, and slightly boring mood Gaye is at such pains to realize, his rhythmic undulations and whisper-to-a-scream timbral shifts can engross the mind, the body, and above all the ear. Definitely a weird one.