The fact that Anna Gordy actually received the royalties from an album that functioned as a kind of long, complicated goodbye letter from her former husband—that the money she earned from the record was money she earned by listening to him sing about their marriage—is one of the stranger ironies in the history of popular music.
But the album itself—its emotional scope, its willingness to hold contradictions without resolving them, its unflinching portrait of what love looks like when it fails—is extraordinary.
David Ritz, writing in the years after Gaye’s death, called it one of the great confessional albums in American music, placing it alongside works by artists who are much more readily associated with personal disclosure.
Robert Christgau, the longtime music critic who reviewed the album on original release with notable prescience, praised its lyrical honesty. The New York Times called much of it brilliant.
A 1994 reissue reached No. 1 on Billboard’s R&B catalog chart. In 2003, the album appeared on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums list. In 2020, it appeared again on the updated version of that list. It is now firmly positioned among the essential albums in Gaye’s catalog—and in the broader canon of American popular music.
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BELGIUM AND THE QUESTION OF RECOVERY
The Belgium years—February 1981 to October 1982—are typically described as the one extended period of stability in Marvin Gaye’s adult life.
This deserves some examination.
“Stability” is a relative term when applied to a man who, during the same period, was navigating the breakup of his second marriage, attempting to escape $4.5 million in IRS debt, living as a tax exile, and working through the fallout of Motown’s unauthorized release of an album he had not approved.