‘I’ll Try Something New’: The Smokey Robinson song Berry Gordy couldn’t live without
Motown certainly lived up to its moniker of Hitsville, USA, during the 1960s. Never before, and arguably never since, has an independent record label orchestrated such a colossal cultural phenomenon in America, dominating the pop charts and acting as a launching pad for now-iconic stars like Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder – the list is virtually endless. At the heart of it all was label boss Berry Gordy Jr, who formed Motown in 1959 with a small loan from his parents. However, no successful revolution is orchestrated alone.
Gordy was certainly the mastermind of the Motown revolution, having an innate ability to spot a hit single, allowing him to pump out groundbreaking records with an unparalleled fury. One of his key skills, particularly during those early days, was spotting talent, and one of his earliest discoveries was Smokey Robinson. The pair crossed paths years prior to the formation of Motown when a teenage Robinson was in a vocal group called The Matadors.
Soon thereafter, Gordy recorded a song, ‘Got A Job’, for Robinson, which he then leased to George Goldner’s End Records. Inevitably, when Gordy came to form Motown – then called Tamla Records – in 1959, Robinson was a key part of the operation from the very beginning. With his rebranded group, The Miracles, Robinson produced a wealth of big-selling singles for Gordy and the label. In fact, he was so instrumental in establishing the Motown sound that Robinson was made vice president of the company in 1960.
Throughout the early years of Motown, Gordy issued a plethora of singles by The Miracles, many of which helped to establish the label in the pop charts of America. The vocalist was clearly one of Motown’s flagship artists, but Gordy could see that his potential was not being fully realised in those early years. Robinson wrote the vast majority of The Miracles tracks with the help of Gordy, who was attempting to teach the vocalist methods of writing hit pop songs.
Eventually, Robinson’s songwriting eclipsed that of Berry Gordy, and The Miracles’ repertoire became one of the strongest on the Motown label. According to the label boss, the turning point in Robinson’s career came in 1962, with the release of the single ‘I’ll Try Something New’, which has always remained a particular favourite of Gordy’s. Appearing on Desert Island Discs in 2016, he called the day the song was written, sharing, “This was a day that changed my life.”
“One of the biggest mistakes I made in my early days was to teach Smokey Robinson how to write songs,” Gordy laughed. Seemingly, once the vocalist had the power to write songs independently, he was virtually unstoppable.
“Smokey was always a great poet,” Gordy continued, “But he came to me one day, and he said, ‘I have a song that I think you’re gonna like, finally,’ because I turned down 90 percent of his songs – 95 percent. He says, ‘It’s called ‘I’ll Try Something New’.’”
This one song forever changed the direction of Robinson’s career. “It scared me, actually, and I felt bad because I said, ‘He can write songs better than I can,’” the label boss shared. From that point on, Robinson continued to write and record original songs for Motown, becoming one of the label’s defining performers and inspiring an unparalleled career in soul and R&B music.
