“I never will”: the singer that made Marvin Gaye never want to duet again
While solo performers don’t ever explicitly need to work alongside others in order to guarantee a hit, if there’s a pairing that feels destined to work, then there’s no point in avoiding the desire to drum up a collaboration.
If you’re good enough to do everything yourself, that’s fair enough, but sometimes there’s a certain special thing about being able to bounce off another performer as part of a duet that working as an individual can never provide you. You might want to take all the glory, but there’s surely enough satisfaction that can arise from a collaboration, and plenty of future opportunities that can come around as a result.
However, you can reach a point in your career where you’re no longer sure what works best for you, and you’ve essentially got to start taking risks in order to reach a level you’re content with. If you’ve found success and joy through both avenues at various points, then you’re going to need to ask yourself what might serve you better in the long run.
Marvin Gaye had had plenty of success both on his own and with a number of sparring partners at part of a duet, but around the time his career was reaching its peak, he was somewhat lost as to where to go next, and felt as though the light that had previously guided him in the right direction had gone out.
Despite the overwhelming success that his 1971 album What’s Going On brought him, and the universal acclaim that it was received with by critics and fans alike, he was never too convinced by the idea of making the album in the first place, and seemingly only ever made the record as a means to an end.
“There seemed to be nothing else to do,” he revealed in an interview shortly after the album’s release. “My life, destiny and fate weren’t pointing in any direction, so I thought maybe that would bring it all together a little more. I don’t have any plans at all. I never plan anything. I never have and I never will.”
However, despite having an outlook that seemed as though he was happy to go with the flow, there was one particular thing that he argued he would never commit to again, and having worked alongside Tammi Terrell on multiple occasions early on in his career, providing both of them with their respective big breaks on their first releases for Motown, he didn’t feel that he’d be able to replace the feeling of working with her again.
“I had such emotional experiences with Tammi and her subsequent death that I don’t imagine I’ll ever work with a girl again,” he continued, effectively drawing a line under the early part of his career and marking this new, freeform era that he’d entered as an opportunity to explore new horizons.
It’s perfectly understandable as to why this would have affected him so much, given the close relationship the two artists shared, but refusing to commit to any future collaboration of this kind was perhaps a barrier towards him being able to properly grieve the situation, and that would likely have sat with him for the remainder of his own life and career.
