Here's the second and last Covered album for the songwriting (and husband and wife) team of Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson.
As this volume began, Ashford and Simpson were writing songs exclusively for Motown Records artists. Both of them were very talented singers, and had all the ingredients to be stars. They'd even released some songs as a duet and individually as far back as 1964, but those hadn't come out on major labels and had no success.
Motown put out two Simpson solo albums, one in 1971 and the other in 1972. But those received very little promotion and went unnoticed by the public. Motown also refused to allow the duo to release an album of hit songs they'd written for others. The truth was, Motown had lots of talented performers, but very few talented songwriters, so the company wanted to keep them writing songs instead of becoming a successful musical act.
For a while, this formula worked. As I mentioned in Volume 1, Ashford and Simpson especially became known for writing the hit songs by the duo of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. I haven't included all of them, and I especially strived to include versions of these songs by others, to prevent this from ending up kind of like a Gaye and Terrell hits album. But here are all the hits they wrote for that duo, in order of release:
Ain't No Mountain High Enough
Your Precious Love
Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing
You're All I Need to Get By
Keep On Lovin' Me Honey
You Ain't Livin' Till You're Lovin'
Good Lovin' Ain't Easy to Come By
The Onion Song
What You Gave Me
California Soul
That's a lot! It's said that Simpson also did the guide vocals on all the songs for Terrell's parts, which were so similar to Terrell's versions that there has been some controversy that maybe some of the released vocals actually were Simpson's, due to Terrell's declining health. (She died in 1970 of a brain tumor.) So these just as easily could have been Gaye and Simpson (or Ashford and Simpson) hits if Motown had wanted it.
Note I also included the Gaye and Terrell 1968 version of "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" in Volume One and the Diana Ross 1970 version of that song here in Volume Two. I rarely do that in my Covered albums, but I've made an exception because both versions were very big hits but they also had drastically different arrangements.
Speaking of Diana Ross, after the end of the Gaye and Terrell duo because of Terrell's tragic early death, they mostly switched to supporting Ross with songs to start out her solo career apart from the Supremes. They wrote and produced nearly all the songs on the first three solo albums by Ross, including some more big hits.
But by 1973, Ashford and Simpson had had enough of Motown preventing them from becoming performers, and they left Motown. Note that this was around the time Motown basically imploded and lost most of its talented songwriters and performers, so the move isn't too surprising. They began releasing about one album a year as a duo starting in 1973. It took them a few years to build momentum, by they began having hit songs and album around 1977. They had two really big hits as a duo in particular: "Found a Cure" in 1977, and "Solid" in 1984.
I wanted this to be an album of songs they wrote for others, not themselves, so I didn't include most of their own hits. Also, to be honest, I wasn't that taken with their own hits as much as the songs they wrote for others. A lot of their own stuff seems generic to me. But "Found a Cure" and "Solid" are both excellent songs, so I wanted to include them. I couldn't find any really good versions of "Found a Cure" by others, since not many musical acts have covered it, so I used the Ashford and Simpson version for that one. But I did find a good cover of "Solid" by Third World, so I went with that one. (It's the only song here recorded after 1982.)
Maybe it's more an issue of my personal taste, but I find I like Ashford and Simpson songs more from before they went solo in 1973. Somewhat remarkably, only five of the songs in these two volumes were written after the two of them left Motown. There's "Found a Cure" and "Solid" as mentioned above, plus "Stuff like That," a song they sang with Chaka Khan for a Quincy Jones album in 1978, "I'm Every Woman," a very big hit for Khan, also in 1978, and "The Boss," a hit for Diana Ross in 1979. A couple other songs appearing late on this volume, like "Ain't Nothing like the Real Thing" by Aretha Franklin and "Your Precious Love" by Al Jarreau and Randy Crawford, are hit versions of songs that were first hits for the Gaye and Terrell duo.
Ashford and Simpson had their biggest hit as a duo with "Solid" in 1984, but after that the hits soon petered out. However, they kept performing as a duo well into the 2000s. As I mentioned in Volume One, Ashford died in 2011, but Simpson is still alive as I write this in 2024.
This album is one hour long.
01 I'm a Winner (Martha & the Vandellas)
02 The Onion Song (Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell)
03 Ain't No Mountain High Enough (Diana Ross)
04 Good Lovin' Ain't Easy to Come By (Supremes & the Four Tops)
05 Reach Out and Touch [Somebody's Hand] (Diana Ross)
06 I'm Your Man (Heptones)
07 Remember Me (Rosetta Hightower)
08 You're All I Need to Get By (Aretha Franklin)
09 Surrender (Diana Ross)
10 Silly Wasn't I (Valerie Simpson)
11 Tear It On Down (Martha & the Vandellas)
12 Ain't Nothing like the Real Thing (Aretha Franklin)
13 Stuff like That (Quincy Jones with Chaka Khan, Ashford & Simpson)
14 I'm Every Woman (Chaka Khan)
15 The Boss (Diana Ross)
16 Found a Cure (Ashford & Simpson)
17 Your Precious Love (Al Jarreau & Randy Crawford)
18 Solid (Third World)
alternate:
https://pixeldrain.com/u/u2U13RQL
I don't know any details about where or when the photo used for the cover was taken. But it's clear to me it was a bunch of years after the photo used for Volume One.
