IF I SHOULD DIE TONIGHT

If I should die tonight
Though it seems far before my time
I won't die blue
'Cause I've known you

There are some tracks that quite literally stop you in your tracks and Marvin Gaye's 'If I Should Die Tonight' is unquestionably one of them. I find it almost impossible to do anything else but listen with complete rapt devotion when this song comes on and can feel an internal sigh instantly induced by the opening refrain alone.

As the half way point on side one of Gaye's classic album 'Let's Get It On' (1973), 'If I Should Die Tonight' arrives like an unexpected musical meteor and one that targets your heart in slow motion until it explodes in a thousand stars. It has to be one of the most soulful outpourings in all of Gaye's discography and somehow it feels especially poignant knowing that a decade later he would die at the age of 44, shot in the chest by his own father after a violent altercation between the two men. Listening to the soulful vulnerability of so much of Gaye's recorded legacy seems almost unbearably poignant in retrospect when taking this untimely tragedy into consideration.

Ooh, oh, how many eyes have seen their dream?
How many arms have felt their dream?
How many hearts, baby, have really felt their world stand still?

It's perhaps ironic that upon hearing the song by Ed Townsend for the first time, Gaye protested that he couldn't sing 'If I Should Die' because he "had never felt that way about a woman in his life." Later, after meeting his future second wife, Janis Hunter, during the recording sessions for 'Let's Get It On', the singer triumphantly exclaimed : "Ed, get that song out. I can sing that sonovabitch now!"

Even though Gaye's masterpiece track was recorded with the inimitable Detroit sound of Motown, I find it to be more the transcendent apex of the Doo Woo style of the 1950s combined with the more luxurious, string heavy, Philly soul style most famously associated with groups such as the 'Delfonics', 'O Jays' and 'Stylistics' as well as solo artists from the same stable, Harold Melvin and Teddy Pendergrass.

Listening on repeat the past few nights to the 1973 soul ballad, I can't help feeling as if it's almost as if Marvin Gaye decided to set and send 'the bar' into the stratosphere and leave it there well beyond anyone else's reach where 'If I Should Die' remains like its own lonely interstellar planet, drifting through space and time, unrivalled in its genre.

That's the thing about truly great songs. They seem to exist in their own orbit where they find zero rival planets to disturb their star system.

One thing is for certain, 'If I Should Die Tonight' is truly out of this world.