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Tell me what you want, reader.
Tell me what moves you.
Aretha could provide it all, for any moment you could dream up and even the ones you couldnt.
It is true that her run of albums in the 60s was impossible.
There was a freedom in the early moments.
On their covers, she was fierce, and carefree.
The first Aretha record I purchased with my own money was 1965sYeah!
!, which I found in a bargain crate at some dive shop in Memphis.
And then, finally, the slight smirk pulled along the left side of her face.
But it certainly doesnt hurt.
They kicked the backing pianist off the bench and sat her down at the instrument she loved.
Aretha was a tremendous piano player.
There is something about a musician who learns to play their instrument by ear.
Wexler said that when the tape ended, Redding muttered she done took my song, ruefully.
He knew that as great as he was, he didnt push the song to its highest possible ceiling.
Otis Redding was singing about submission, Aretha was singing about equity.
Aretha knew to place emphasis on the word over the actual ask.
To spell it out, letting the demand hang off of each letter twice.
The albums didnt always sell, but they were strong.
They showed that third acts were possible even when the times didnt seem made for you anymore.
Five of her seven 80s albums produced a charting single, some produced two.
Beyond that, it was the flex of surviving another decade of immensely rigorous output, her last one.
She only put out two albums in the 90s, and five from 2000 until her death.
But her voice endured, and our desire to hear it lingered.
One cover stood out.
Aretha sangRolling in the Deep,which had originally been sung by Adele four years earlier.
The audio is imperfect and not particularly well engineered.
But then, around the 2:30 mark, something shifts.
This, too, was her greatest, most impossible gift.
The one she showed us time after time.
She might take your song.
She might pay tribute to something you made by making it her own.
Honoring you with one hand while reshaping your legacy with the other.
Even when producers tried to drown her in Auto-Tune.
She was at least still swinging for the fences.
That takes a special jot down of hearing, born out of a special jot down of affection.
To know what you love, and then insist on improving on what you love.
She was a curator of moments ones that existed as good, but with the potential to be better.
Aretha knew how to make something useful out of the dull mundanity of our always-thrashing emotions.
How to carve each letter of what she needed into the earth.
It seems the whole point is that there is no comfort even for the heartbreak one knows is coming.
She was trying to tell us all along.
