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Aretha Franklin

VH1 Divas Live: A Life-Changing Show

April 14, 2023

Aretha Franklin·Featured·Mariah Carey·Music·Retrospectives·Then

I was recently at a friend’s house for game night, and upon finally finding the lost remote and taking over music (as I regularly do), I found an excuse to descend down a YouTube rabbit hole purely focused on performances from VH1’s Divas concerts. They’re my favorite series of concerts and are responsible for the most formative moments in my

Aretha Franklin·Featured·In Depth·Music·Retrospectives

Aretha Franklin’s ‘Sweet Passion’ Yielded Mixed Results

Very little has been written about Aretha Franklin’s 1977 album Sweet Passion. Of the three most significant written accounts of Aretha’s life, none of them dedicate more than a paragraph to the album, focusing instead on her budding romance with second husband Glynn Turman and the resurgence she experienced with

The Electrifying Aretha Franklin: Aretha’s Sophomore Album

Most people have never heard Aretha Franklin’s sophomore album, 1962’s The Electrifying

Revisiting Aretha: A Woman Falling Out Of Love 10 Years Later

I woke up at the crack of dawn on May 3, 2011.

Aretha Franklin’s Young, Gifted and Black Turns 50

January 24, 2022

Aretha Franklin·Featured·In Depth·Retrospectives·Then

I was around 8 or 9 when I got my copy of Aretha Franklin’s Young, Gifted and Black. It arrived via one of the storied, long-defunct CD clubs (some do still exist but now exclusively push DVDs). For those who weren’t attune to those clubs, they would send alluring catalogs

Aretha Franklin’s Love All The Hurt Away

August 20, 2021

Aretha Franklin·Featured·In Depth·Music·Retrospectives

By 1981, Aretha Franklin was finding her musical footing again. The 70’s had started strong for Aretha, producing some of the most significant work of her career, but they ended dismally. After departing Atlantic Records for Clive Davis’ Arista Records at the turn of the decade, Aretha opted for a

What You See Is What You Sweat: Aretha Franklin’s New Jack Swing and A Miss

June 25, 2021

Aretha Franklin·Featured·Music·Retrospectives

What You See Is What You Sweat isn’t at the forefront of the Aretha Franklin canon. In fact, the 1991 album helps bring up the rear, and there’s been very little written on it since its release. It’s just not a solid representation of the tenacity of Aretha Franklin musically

Celebrating Aretha Franklin’s Aretha Live At Fillmore West

May 19, 2021

Aretha Franklin·Featured·Retrospectives

“She was afraid she didn’t belong there,” Aretha Franklin’s producer Jerry Wexler told David Ritz in Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin. That was Aretha’s mentality about staging a show in the heart of the hippie revolution: San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. For all her hesitance, Aretha Franklin was sitting on

10 Aretha Franklin Songs You Need To Hear

March 25, 2020

Aretha Franklin·Artists·Music

Aretha Franklin’s catalog is so vast that you could listen to one Aretha Franklin song every day for a year and not get through all of her material (trust me, I’ve been working on that on my blog). And while most people can name a handful of Aretha songs, whether