Aretha Franklin: I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You (180g, coloured vinyl) [VINYL ME, PLEASE]

Why you'll love it

This Vinyl Me, Please edition is cut all-analog from the original mono tapes by Ryan Smith at Sterling Sound, on 180g coloured vinyl in a tip-on jacket with a lyric booklet. The album reached No. 2 on the Billboard 200, spent 14 weeks at No. 1 on the R&B albums chart, and Rolling Stone ranks it No. 13 among the 500 greatest albums.

This edition

• 180g coloured vinyl
• Mono, cut from the original tapes
• Lacquers cut by Ryan Smith at Sterling Sound
• All-analog (AAA)
• Tip-on jacket
• Lyric booklet

About the album

After years of jazz standards at Columbia, Aretha Franklin signed to Atlantic, and producer Jerry Wexler took her down to FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. The title track came out of that first session; the rest was finished at Atlantic Studios in New York, with members of the Muscle Shoals rhythm section flown up to play with her. The tape machines at the two studios ran at slightly different speeds, so parts of "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man" were stitched together across two cities.

Her take on Otis Redding's "Respect" topped the Hot 100 and became her signature song (Rolling Stone later named it the greatest song of all time), and the title track reached No. 9. "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man," "Dr. Feelgood," "Drown in My Own Tears" and Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come" show her range, and Aretha wrote four of the songs herself.

It went gold in 1967 on its way to nearly two million copies, and Pitchfork rated it the tenth best album of the 1960s. Rolling Stone also put it at No. 1 on its Women in Rock list; she did, after all, spell it out.

Also at Kops: more Aretha Franklin on vinyl · browse Classic Soul

Tracklist

Listen

On Atlantic / Vinyl Me, Please, a reissue of the 1967 album.