Let’s Stay Together by Al Green

Let's Stay Together, Al Green's fourth album, came out on Hi Records on January 31, 1972, and it's the moment the Memphis soul man stopped knocking on the door and walked right in. Willie Mitchell produced it at Royal Recording Studio in Memphis, his third go-round with Green, and the two of them work together as tight as a handshake.

The title track is the whole seduction in miniature: a lazy, loping groove that never raises its voice, and Green floating up into a falsetto that could melt a jukebox. It turned into the song everybody knows him by, and the only one of his singles to top the pop chart. The album climbed to number eight on the pop chart and sat at the top of the soul chart for ten weeks straight, the first of six Green albums in a row to get there, and it opened the classic run of records the critics still swoon over.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.