Trivia / Marvin Gaye

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• Career Resurrection: Midnight Love proved to be this for him but sadly, it also proved to be brief, due to his murder two years later.
• Celebrity Break-Up Song: The entire album, Here, My Dear is about Gaye's break-up with his wife, Motown executive, Anna Gordy. Before this album, he also wrote "Distant Lover" about their crumbling marriage.
• Contractual Obligation Project: Here, My Dear came about after Gaye agreed to give his ex-wife half the proceeds from the next album he did after their divorce. Because it met with mixed critical reception and lackluster sales, the rumor arose he intentionally made a bad album so it wouldn't sell. For what it's worth, he didn't.
• Creator Breakdown: Here, My Dear was written in the aftermath of Gaye's divorce from his first wife and in an atmosphere of impending financial ruin. Listening to it, it immediately becomes clear it could not have been written and recorded by a man who was in a good emotional place.
  • Tammi Terrell's death from a brain tumor hit him especially hard. "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" is undoubtedly their most famous hit together, and Gaye stated that he considered her to be like a sister to him. Needless to say, her death caused him to spiral into a life of drugs and alcohol from which he never fully recovered.
• Executive Meddling: What's Going On was initially rejected as a single by Berry Gordy ^note  At the time, Motown had a strict (albeit unwritten) rule about songs only being about cars and pretty girls. Anything more "complicated" would be rejected. . Once Gaye threatened to leave Motown if the single was not released, Gordy released it.
  • This also happened with In Our Lifetime: the album was originally slated to be released in 1979 as a disco-styled album called Love Man, however, after a production plagued by his collapsing second marriage, debts with the IRS, and cocaine addiction, Gaye shelved the album and later on, went back to rework the album, spending most of 1980 doing so, but Motown eventually got hold of the album's master tapes, and with the album over a year behind schedule, made their own revisions to it unbeknownst to Gaye, who was still remixing and editing the album, and released it in early 1981. The subsequent fallout ended Gaye's relationship with Motown.
• He Also Did: He played the memorable synth bass part himself on "Got to Give It Up".
• Reality Subtext: Nearly every song off "Here, My Dear" is about Gaye's (then) crumbling marriage and financial situation.
• What Could Have Been: Gaye and Barry White were planning to record an album together. Then Gaye was murdered.
  • According to co-writer Barry Gibb, "Islands In The Stream," the enormous hit for Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers, was originally intended for Gaye.
  • A tragic example of what might not have been. In 1969, Marvin actually came close to shooting himself before his then father in law, Berry Gordy Sr., intervened and talked him out of it. It’s impossible to imagine what 70s Soul music would have been like without Marvin’s output.

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