"With Everything I Feel In Me" by Aretha Franklin
In which Franklin stays the course as the hits dry up.
Between the conclusion of the Let Me In Your Life sessions in March 1973 and the album’s release in February 1974, Aretha Franklin began to worry her friends and family. She’d taken the $6M Atlantic had paid to renew her contract and bought a townhouse on the Upper East Side.
“It wasn’t long after she moved into the town house that she started having what she described as nightmares,” said Erma. “She started calling me nearly every day back in Detroit with stories of these terrible dreams. She said they were foreboding. Her voice sounded shaky- which is not at all typical of my sister.” Her people grew steadily more alarmed. Carolyn, author of Aretha classics like “Ain’t No Way”, “Angel”, and “Pullin’”, recalls: “It became increasingly difficult for her to get out of bed. She did an enormous amount of crying and ultimately we had no choice but to get her to a hospital.”
Franklin stayed three days at Mount Sinai for “acute physical exhaustion”, and upon her release called a press conference, the very first of her career, to dispel the ‘erroneous reports coming out of New York’.” Her longtime booking agent and trusted lieutenant Ruth Bowen later stated, “The truth is that she had suffered something of a breakdown but was adamant that the public see her as healthy.”
Her mighty striving to maintain a marketable image is palpable everywhere throughout her next release, With Everything I Feel In Me. The cover image is of a slim, scantily clad Franklin wearing a lascivious smile. The tracklist accommodates Brill Building pop, bombastic funk, and MOR ballads. By 1974, soul music was in deep decline, its final end imminent, and if the Queen of Soul were to survive in the ruthless, notoriously fickle American marketplace, she’d need to adapt. And the impression one gets from the album is of mastery in retreat, taking victories where they’re found.
“Without Love”:
Overtures are made to the rising disco sound on a sprightly but overlong take on the David-Bacharach chestnut “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” and Stevie Wonder’s “I Love Every Little Thing About You”, stripped of its verve via a genteel, mid-tempo reading. Elsewhere, the old magic remains, such as wistful opener “Without Love” (#6 R&B), co-written by Carolyn Franklin and Ivory Joe Hunter, by 1974 another lion in winter. “Sing It Again- Say It Again”, an additional Carolyn Franklin copyright, evokes the toughness and abandon of Spirit In The Dark.
“When You Get Right Down To It” is a propulsive ballad with a dynamic strings-and-synthesizer crescendo courtesy of Arif Mardin, another old friend. “You’ll Never Get To Heaven”, the album’s second David-Bacharach cut, is long and dull. It’s redeemed only by a coda in which the music slowly, stealthily recedes, until finally Franklin is singing unaccompanied, her miraculous gift in full bloom. “All Of These Things” bears similar flaws, memorable mostly for Franklin’s vocal astonishments and Cornell Dupree’s lyrical solo.
The album’s title track (#20 R&B) is ominous, sex-as-transcendence funk, with a rafter-shaking chorus in which Aretha repeatedly demands- “Are you coming? Are you coming?” while the Memphis Horns blare. It’s the album’s best song, an overlooked gem from her wilderness years.
“With Everything I Feel In Me”:
With Everything I Feel In Me is a good album. The band is prime, the songs often strong, or at least passable, the singer the greatest of the twentieth century. But there’s a sense of diminishing returns, of a vanished flame. This ennui would prove yet more pervasive on 1975’s You, the album whose abject failure begat the end of the fabled Franklin-Wexler partnership.
All quotations taken from David Ritz’s “Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin”, Little, Brown and Company, 2015.