Bob Marley & The Wailers’ ‘Kaya’ Gets 420 Reissue
The album, featuring ‘Is This Love,’ is available on a special edition picture disc.
In celebration of 420, a new reissue of Bob Marley & The Wailers’ Kaya has arrived. The music icon’s 1978 album, featuring the timeless hit “Is This Love,” is now for sale as a special “420” edition picture disc featuring a unique cover art treatment with a silver mirror laminate. This picture disc reissue is available only through the official Bob Marley online shop.
The Wailers released Kaya in March 1978, a month ahead of the One Love Peace Concert in Kingston, which marked Marley’s return to Jamaica from London. The album emerged at a time when Marley, a massive star in Europe, the UK, and Jamaica, was primed for a breakout in the United States.
“Kaya presented a gentler and friendlier version of Bob Marley & the Wailers, but it also documented Marley and his group at the peak of their abilities,” Mark Deming later wrote at All Music Guide. “The nuance in Marley’s vocals on ‘Running Away,’ ‘She’s Gone,’ and ‘Is This Love’ showed how much he’d grown as a performer since Catch a Fire, and his passion elevates ‘Misty Morning’ into one of the album’s highlights.”
“Kaya, like Exodus before it, was recorded in London, during Marley’s period of ‘exile’ from Jamaica, and is often referred to as a sister album to Exodus,” David Sinclair explained in a uDiscoverMusic retrospective. “But the two collections could hardly have offered more of a contrast in tone. After the apocalyptic visions and majestic peaks of Exodus, the musical ambience of Kaya reflected a more peaceful and harmonious state of mind.”
Though it incorporated three songs first recorded for 1971’s Soul Revolution Part II—including “Sun Is Shining,” which posthumously became one of Marley’s best-loved tracks, and “Satisfy My Soul”—Kaya is best known for “Is This Love,” the swooning love song that was a UK top 10 hit upon release and later became the opening track on Marley’s essential Legend compilation. A seven-year-old Naomi Campbell appeared in the music video, shot at the Keskidee Arts Centre in London.
