Recently, the heaviest stuff in the world to me has come from the unmatchable talents of Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, and Gladys Knight and the Pips. I won't go into length on the obvious connections between these three artists, rather, I would like to pinpoint a few of the things that actually do run common through them on a musical level. I know there are many more factors that go into making these three acts as badass as they are, but I'm just gonna have to go with they all had great production, they all had wonderful voices, and they all had incredible bands. Three songs recorded by Franklin, Ross, and Knight that just feel so right to me are, respectively, "I Ain't Never Loved a Man the way that I Love You," "Someday We'll Be Together," and "Midnight Train to Georgia."
Lately, "Midnight Train..." has really been talking to me. Maybe it's the perfect melding of driving rhythm and laid-back, smoky room contemplation of bygone (or impending) sadness. If you've ever sat in the upper room (sans communion or tongues of flame) at Spaceland in LA, you may know the feeling I'm referring to. Perhaps it's knowing that the subject of the song realized that it wasn't going to happen (dreams don't always come true... uh-uh, no, uh-uh...), and the awful reality of that stings just long enough before the wonderful truth of his lady's unconditional love usurps the pain of those sun-shriveled raisins of deferred dreams. Maybe I just love it because it was on a tape my Dad bought for me at a gas station right before a trip when I was eleven.
It's gotta be that voice. Just like the other aforementioned goddesses of soul, Knight's voice just makes me feel so good. I could go on and on with adjectives and comparisons and metaphors, but if you've ever really listened, you know the only way to truly describe what happens when you hear that voice, or those voices, is that it just makes you feel so damned good.
In the end, it doesn't matter what it is about the song that makes me feel it so deeply. Feeling it so deeply is what matters. I hope you know the feeling.
So maybe I strayed a bit from my intention of detaining for you what these three acts share. I'm okay with that. Once again, I was derailed by The Feeling.
