Let's Stay Together
About this Album
Released on January 31, 1972, Let's Stay Together was Al Green's fourth studio album and the record that cemented his signature sound: hushed, unhurried soul built with producer Willie Mitchell and the house musicians at Hi Records' Royal Studios in Memphis.[1]
The sessions brought together the Hodges brothers on guitar and bass, drummers Al Jackson Jr. and Howard Grimes, the Memphis Horns, and the Rhodes Sisters on backing vocals, a lineup steeped in the same Stax-adjacent Memphis tradition that shaped Southern soul through the late 1960s and into the '70s.[2]
The album moves across the emotional range of a relationship, from devotion to doubt to dissolution, and became a commercial and critical landmark: it hit number eight on the pop albums chart and became the first of six consecutive Green albums to top the soul album chart, camping at number one there for ten straight weeks.[1]
Among its highlights is a six-minute reworking of the Bee Gees' How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, slowed down and given a lavish, gospel-tinged arrangement with an all-female backing choir, a performance many critics single out as one of the album's emotional peaks.[2]