I was listening to this yesterday and I remember when I first heard it in the late 70s. It was a radio DJ in Chicago who was having a Motown Weekend. Literally. Every single record he played that weekend was a Motown 60s record. I was still new to Motown so this was absolutely EXCITING to me! I carried around a portable tape player so I could record EVERYTHING!

When Marvin Gaye's "Your Unchanging Love" came on and I already knew "How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By You" so my immediate thought was "OH! This must have been the follow-up. Good one! A few years later, I got ahold of The Rolling Stone Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll and there was whole Motown chapter with discography. When I saw that "Your Unchanging Love" was put out in 1967, I was blown away. Absolutely. By this time, I was getting hipper about how the Motown Sound had changed slightly from the early days through the end of the sixties and "Your Unchanging Love" just sounded SO '64-ish to me. I always wondered how Motown came around to picking that record to release.

Context. I know there's some context that I'm missing because I'm looking at a 1967 release from the vantage point several decades removed. Over the years I've learned that by The Summer of Love, there was a growing nostalgia on the part of 20-somethings for the music of their childhood and radio stations were doing the Oldies But Goodies thing. I've also learned how in the mid-to-late 60s, the Low Rider community had a love for Mary Wells' early Motown records; they wouldn't touch any of her newer post-Motown music, just the older material.

So was there maybe something happening at the time with the public that Motown thought that this earlier throwback-sounding Marvin Gaye record would tap into that psyche? I like the record, but it's just kinda odd that they would put this one out between the much-newer sounds of his Tammi Terrell duets.