Marvin Gaye

Fact is, we don't know of many musicians who embody the artist's journey better than Marvin Gaye, who, over the course of a Technicolor career, morphed from refined Motown soul singer to politically/sexually-charged visionary. Honey-dripping early hits like "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)" and the lost-in-love Tammi Terrell duets ("Ain't No Mountain High Enough") are the glittering epitome of everything Motown stood for. But Gaye ached to express deeper impulses, resulting in fearlessly intimate masterpieces like "What's Going On," the blaxploitation groove "Trouble Man," and the could-melt-the-polar-icecap seducer "Let's Get it On."

Next Steps takes on a whole new meaning when you're talking about Marvin Gaye, an artist driven by a combustible combination of genius, drive, and demons to take his music to levels only he knew about. We make it easy to track the man's sometimes bizarre odyssey, from the bright-eyed bounce of his early Motown singles ("It Takes Two," a pre-Tammi Terrell duet with Kim Weston) to his finger-poppin' mid-period output ("That's the Way Love Is") to his latter-day concept jams ("You're the Man, Pts. I & II").

When you're dealing with Marvin, you're dealing with dozens of hit singles, a handful of what-it-is concept albums, and some choice posthumous platters. In other words, you're dealing with a buried-treasure paradise for hopeless soul junkies. Naturally, we did what any good Marvin freak would do — got deep in it, digging up the ageless album cuts (the soul-scorching "Is That Enough"), the honeyed-tenor showcase ("Why Did I Choose You"), and covers that take C-4 to the originals before rebuilding them from the ground up (the Beatles' "Yesterday").

The first thing that grabs you is the voice — that almost supernatural three-octave tenor that raises your spirit and the hair on your arms — and keeps that all-too-human heart pounding within standards like "I Heard It Through the Grapevine." But when it comes to Marvin Gaye, the man possessed worlds within worlds: sure, he was the soul icon who practically held the deed to the charts for the better part of two decades, but he was also a visionary who pushed the music's potential to its outer limits, regularly crafting deep-groove political-social-sexual mind-explosions — in the process building a legend that would speak to generations of artists long after his unfathomable 1984 shooting death.