Quote Originally Posted by arr&bee View Post
i hear you,but don't sleep on[dear lover]because it's as good as anything she did at motown to my ears.
Exactly. It was one of her best post-Motown recordings and one of the times where they nailed that Motown Sound as close as possible. I wasn't downgrading the song, but commenting on the fact that the song was recorded by Mary precisely because it was that good. There was an urgent need to get a hit and the feeling was the only way to do so was to create that Motown feeling. "Dear Lover" accomplished what many of her other post-Motown songs didn't.

Had Mary been at Motown, my thought was Mary would have already had a ton of possible hits at her disposal by Motown's in-house writers already. I don't recall any other time when someone outside of Motown ever approached the company with a song for one of their hit artists, so as great a song as "Dear Lover" is, would the writers have said, "Hey, let's take this to Motown to have Mary Wells record it" knowing Motown was pretty exclusive about publishing and ownership of their songs?

Might be digging myself into a bigger hole here, so switching gears, another song I wish that had been released was "Love Letters." That one had a fantastic Motown flavor as well. I think the lyrics could have been tweaked a bit, but that song, I always hit REPEAT several times when I play it.