Let’s Get It On by Marvin Gaye

Let's Get It On, Marvin Gaye's twelfth album, slid out on August 28, 1973, on Motown's Tamla imprint, and after the social alarm bells of What's Going On it turns the lights down low. The sessions sprawled from June 1970 to July 1973, across Hitsville U.S.A. and Golden World Studio in Detroit and Hitsville West in Los Angeles, and what came out was Gaye's first real plunge into funk, laced with smooth soul and old doo-wop sweetness.

This is a record about sex that keeps reaching for something like salvation, Gaye's voice stacked on top of itself in layer after layer of sighs and pleas. The title track, "Come Get to This" and "You Sure Love to Ball" all hit the Billboard charts, it became his biggest seller of the Motown years, and the label handed him more control. That title track helped invent the slow jam and the quiet storm, and the album went into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2003.

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