Amplifier Album Review: Marvin Gaye, Here, My Dear (Tamla, 1978)

One generation before Atlanta singer Usher put his 2004 Confessions on wax, Marvin Gaye revealed his, documenting the ends of his failed marriage to his first wife, Anna Gordy Gaye, the sister of Motown founder Berry Gordy. Released in 1978 on Tamla, Here, My Dear announced Gaye’s intentions to move on from a fraught public marriage into the life that he had carried on behind the Motown lights. His narratives of flight on the album are irrevocably tethered to that label, that history, and the family that helped him become a household name. As both an expression of penance and a tribute to his distressed ex, Here, My Dear is the sound of his transition, his crossing over, from the camera intimacy of the Gordy empire to the realities of his second family. All of this is audible in the conversations he has with his listeners and himself in the...