Marvin Gaye’s New Deluxe ‘Let’s Get It On’ For Digital, 50th Anniversary Release
The new version will feature 33 bonus tracks, of which 18 are previously unreleased.
Marvin Gaye’s 1973 staple Let’s Get It On will be released digitally by Motown/UMe as a revised and expanded digital edition on August 25, to mark its 50th anniversary. The new version will feature 33 bonus tracks, of which 18 are previously unreleased.
The original album will also be available in a new Dolby Atmos mix and over the coming weeks, new video content will be premiered for select tracks. There will also be an e-commerce-only colored vinyl edition of the original LP. On August 23, a Let’s Get It On event will take place at the Grammy Museum featuring Smokey Robinson, Jimmy Jam, and Gaye’s biographer David Ritz. Tickets are available here.
The new Let’s Get It On: Deluxe Edition contains tracks cut during six intense months of recording sessions in Los Angeles in 1973. It presents the original eight songs on the LP alongside unheard mixes and material from all those sessions, as well as a trove of funky and fascinating instrumental tracks, and unreleased versions of the ballad recordings that Gaye returned to time and again.
This pivotal album in Gaye’s personal and creative evolution, which topped Billboard’s Soul LPs chart and hit No.2 on the all-genre Top LPs chart, was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2004. Its classic title track and lead single reached No.1 on both the US pop and R&B charts. Jon Landau, writing about Let’s Get It On in Rolling Stone, observed: “It flows with ease…Gaye’s voice, hovering around the falsetto, holding our attention and providing unique transitions in mood and style.”
In Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye, Ritz wrote: “The paradox is this: The sexiest of Marvin Gaye’s work is also his most spiritual. That’s the paradox of Marvin himself. In his struggle to wed body and soul, in his exploration of sexual passion, he expresses the most human of hunger – the hunger for God. In those songs of loss and lament – the sense of separation is heartbreaking. On one level, the separation is between man and woman. On a deeper level, the separation is between man and God.”
Pre-order Let’s Get It On: Deluxe Edition.
