The 80s Love Album is a spectacularly expansive, deeply nostalgic, and masterfully curated definitive multi-disc anthology tracking the romantic, melodic, and synth-drenched pop topography of a defining musical decade, issued in 2017 by the esteemed UK archival compilation imprint Crimson. Spanning nearly four hours across three beautifully balanced discs, this high-fidelity studio document acts as an exhaustive library of original charting masterpieces, tracing the multi-faceted ways love, heartbreak, and late-night grooves intersected on 1980s radio. The collection avoids standard compilation traps by expanding its focus across a highly compelling genre matrix, balancing the era's towering pop icons and rock ballad maestros with essential architects of UK new wave, sophisti-pop, post-disco funk, and urban soul.

Another in a series of superb wandering groove albums from the premier sweet soul singer. He took the standard three-minute pop soul song and expanded the format. It is Gaye that is responsible for today's smooching urban r&b; he was for much of his career many years ahead of the game. This has been described as his oral sex album, not that the others were not; this has the erotic edge. Built around the title track, the album is a theme album and as such should be played as a whole. There are no "Too Busy Thinking Bout My Baby's on this; it is a much more challenging but satisfying work.

Motown's "Prince Of Soul," Marvin Gaye, was already a hit artist for nearly a decade when, in 1971, he reached new heights with his album What's Going On. An immediate landmark recording, it was the first of Gaye's albums to break the top ten of Billboard's Top LPs, and quickly became Motown's best-selling record. To this day, What's Going On is hailed as one of the greatest albums of all time, earning the number one spot on Rolling Stone magazine's 2020 list of "The 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time."

Marvin's definitely in the groove on this set - cooking on all burners with a host of late 60s Motown hits - bad-stepping his way towards some of the more mature moments to come in the 70s! The album's probably best remembered for the cut "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" - easily one of Marvin's biggest moments of the 60s, and a track whose popularity led to the album's title change from In The Groove to later incarnations as Heard It Through The Grapevine! Other cuts are equally great, and show Gaye really stretching out with mature, masculine confidence.

Marvin Gaye's Love Songs: Greatest Duets gathers most of his best-known duets, organizing them by singing partner. After getting off to a poor, but well-meaning start with a 1994 version of "Distant Lover" that pairs Gaye's original vocals with re-recorded vocals by Betty Wright and tinny-sounding production, the album does a 180 by offering up some of the best work Gaye did with his ultimate duet partner, Tammi Terrell. Along with definitive songs like "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing" and "You're All I Need to Get By," the collection also includes lesser-known gems such as the lovely "If This World Were Mine."

For the compilers of Time-Life Music's Singers & Songwriters series, which – more or less – chronicles the 1970s singer/songwriter movement, the 24-month period 1970-1971 marked the real birth of that trend, with the popular emergence of such defining figures as James Taylor, Carole King, Carly Simon, John Denver, and Cat Stevens, all of whom had their first big hits in the style included here.