It’s difficult to write about Aretha’s 1967 album, her tenth, without descending into hyperbole. After five years of floundering at Capital reinterpreting standards, in some ways this is the first true Aretha Franklin album. Impeccably backed by the Muscle Shoals band, it is a soul music classic, one of the strongest in the canon, but it also transcends genre. The moments of spine-tingling beauty are countless, the hits keep coming; it’s a genuine thing of beauty. 

Aretha’s debut with Atlantic Records, I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, is rightfully celebrated as an epochal moment in American music with some even suggesting that it birthed soul music as we’ve come to understand it. Even without such lofty framing, it’s also just a timeless listen in how it marries Aretha’s Detroit gospel roots and incomparable vocal power and nuance with a Southern soul tradition executed to perfection by some of Memphis’s finest session players. While “Respect” is the album’s most enduring hit, practically every song on here deserves the heaviest of rotations, whether it’s the rollicking country funk of “Save Me” or Aretha’s touching elegy to her late mentor and friend Sam Cooke on her cover of his “A Change Is Gonna Come.”