The first voice heard on The Many Sides of Love does not arrive beneath Darlene Love’s name. The opening track is credited to jazz guitarist Barney Kessel, and it is called “TV Commercials,” a compact parade of advertising music from 1963. Voices dart in and out, selling imaginary brightness with the precision of people who could make almost anything sound exciting on command.
It is an odd beginning until the idea behind this collection becomes clear. Darlene Love’s history is scattered across other people’s records, borrowed group names, television stages, movie soundtracks, uncredited sessions and hits released beneath the identities of singers who were not standing at the microphone. A conventional greatest-hits album would show only the tallest buildings. The Many Sides of Love travels through the alleys, workshops and service entrances where much of American pop music was actually made.
The Oakland Public Library copy makes an especially appropriate doorway into that history. Its cover is already carrying two identities. The artwork has been designed to resemble a stylish Reprise Records album from the 1960s, with Love caught in motion beneath large mustard-yellow lettering and a row of song titles running along the top. Over that carefully reconstructed past, the library has applied its own system: Oakland address label, catalog sticker, barcode, handwritten genre code and a large circular security label covering part of the disc.
Nothing about this object pretends to be untouched. It has been prepared to travel.
That matters because James TB would not have bought this collection on his own. The library placed it within reach without requiring prior knowledge, collector instincts or a reason to search for Darlene Love’s forgotten Reprise singles. This is one of the quiet powers of a good public music collection. It does not merely provide familiar records without charge. It places entrances to undiscovered worlds among them.
The title sounds broad, but The Many Sides of Love is not a general career anthology. Its center is a very specific pocket of recordings made for Reprise during the 1960s, outside the body of Phil Spector productions most listeners associate with Love. The tracks appeared under three different identities: the Wildcats, the Blossoms and Darlene Love herself. They were written, arranged and produced by an extraordinary rotation of people, including Lee Hazlewood, Jack Nitzsche, Jimmy Bowen, Van McCoy, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, David Gates, Ernie Freeman, Gene Page, Bill Justis and H.B. Barnum.
That concentration of talent might suggest a carefully planned album campaign. It was nothing of the kind. These were separate singles, experiments and assignments created across several years, each trying another frame around the same astonishing voice.
Before she was Darlene Love, she was Darlene Wright, a minister’s daughter who learned to sing in church. She has described the choir as her training ground, the place where she learned harmony and understood that a voice was not only an individual expression but something that could lock into other voices and change the strength of the whole.
That education became the foundation of her professional life. While still in high school, she joined the Blossoms, an existing Los Angeles vocal group whose membership changed over time. With Love, Fanita James and Jean King, the group developed into one of the great hidden engines of West Coast recording.
The Blossoms could sound youthful, mature, tender, glamorous, urgent or anonymous according to what a session required. That flexibility brought them an enormous amount of work. They sang behind pop stars, soul singers, television performers, novelty records, movie personalities and rock groups. Love later estimated that she had backed more than two hundred well-known artists.
The list is less important than the skill behind it. Session singing required far more than possessing a beautiful voice. The singers had to arrive prepared, learn rapidly, read the emotional temperature of a song, build harmonies, match vowels, control volume and provide whatever personality the producer believed the record was missing. Some days began in the morning and continued into sessions late at night. The job demanded stamina without leaving much room for artistic vanity.
Love’s voice could blend, but it could never become completely faceless. There is a metal beam inside it. Even at its sweetest, it carries gospel authority, a sense that the singer is not simply describing an emotion but calling the room to witness it. She can lean into the rhythm with the force of a rock vocalist, then soften a phrase without allowing it to lose shape. The sound is joyous without being lightweight and commanding without becoming rigid.
Phil Spector recognized that force when he used Love and the Blossoms to record “He’s a Rebel.” The record went to number one, but it was released under the name of the Crystals, a different group located across the country. Love also sang lead on “He’s Sure the Boy I Love,” which was again credited to the Crystals. Spector gave Darlene Wright the name Darlene Love, created some of the greatest settings her voice would ever occupy, and repeatedly confused the public record of who was actually singing.
The usual version of her story becomes trapped there, with Spector as the dark planet around which everything else must orbit. This CD is valuable because it steps outside that gravity. The Reprise sides show what happened when Love and the Blossoms entered studios controlled by other producers, arrangers and songwriters. The voice remains unmistakable, but the architecture keeps changing around it.
“TV Commercials,” credited to Barney Kessel, establishes the Blossoms first as working vocal professionals. Instead of introducing Love with one of her grand emotional showcases, the collection begins with commerce, craft and a studio assignment. It is a playful choice, but also an honest one. Before history separated classics from filler, musicians moved from job to job. Today’s advertisement, tomorrow’s backing session and next week’s possible hit were all part of the same working life.
The next two tracks disguise the Blossoms as the Wildcats. Lee Hazlewood and Jack Nitzsche produced “What Are We Gonna Do in ’64?” and “3625 Groovy Street,” two miniature pieces of Los Angeles pop strangeness. Hazlewood’s humor and Nitzsche’s dramatic instincts give them a slightly crooked edge. The singers perform in unison, turning themselves into a bright collective character rather than placing Love alone at the front.
“What Are We Gonna Do in ’64?” already sounded disposable by design, tied to a particular year before that year had finished. Six decades later, the expiration date has become part of its fascination. The record preserves a moment when the future could be advertised in two minutes, sung by three women under a name they did not normally use, then sent into shops to fend for itself.
“3625 Groovy Street” is even stranger, a fabricated destination with enough bounce and atmosphere to seem briefly real. The track belongs to that peculiar part of mid-century pop where a record could function as a song, a joke, a dance invitation and a tiny theatrical set. Love and the Blossoms do not need to reveal their deepest selves for the performance to matter. Their commitment makes the artificial world hold together.
Once the collection reaches the singles credited properly to the Blossoms, the emotional temperature rises. “That’s When the Tears Start,” written by Van McCoy and arranged by Ernie Freeman, has the explosive forward motion of a record that should have become much larger than it did. The title promises heartbreak, but the performance refuses to sit still and suffer politely. Drums, horns and voices turn sorrow into movement.
This is one of Love’s defining abilities. She does not treat pain as weakness. When the lyric breaks, her voice expands. The tears may have started, but the person singing is still upright, still occupying the center of the song and still capable of making the band work harder.
“Good, Good Lovin’,” written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, is warmer and more sensual. The Blossoms sound less like background singers stepping forward than a complete soul group that should never have required explanation. The harmonies are polished, but the record retains a little grit around its edges. Love’s lead does not float over the group. It pulls the other voices into its current.
Jimmy Bowen produced much of this material, but the shifting arrangers prevent the singles from settling into one house sound. Ernie Freeman brings rhythmic clarity and orchestral punch. Gene Page gives “Let Your Love Shine on Me” a different kind of glow, with the elegance that would make him one of the crucial arrangers of West Coast soul and pop. Bill Justis frames “Deep Into My Heart” with yet another palette.
Instead of a single producer building a monument around Love, these records resemble a row of beautifully furnished rooms. She enters each one, adjusts to its dimensions and remains herself.
“My Love, Come Home” gives the group a more sweeping romantic setting, while “Lover Boy” carries a composition credit from David Gates before Bread made him synonymous with the softest reaches of 1970s pop. Hearing one of his songs inside a mid-1960s Blossoms single reveals how many future careers were passing through these sessions in unfinished form.
“Let Your Love Shine on Me” has the uplift suggested by its title, but Love’s church foundation keeps the song from becoming merely decorative. Words such as “shine” and “love” arrive with an older gospel charge behind them. Secular pop borrows the language of salvation, and Love understands both meanings without needing to announce the border between them.
“Deep Into My Heart,” written by Baker Knight, is another reminder that these singers could move among musical dialects without sounding like tourists. The record has a different shape from the Spector productions, less engulfing and more open. Love can be heard working within the arrangement rather than fighting her way through a wall of instruments.
The final Reprise single presents her explicitly as Darlene Love. “Too Late to Say You’re Sorry,” produced by Jimmy Bowen and arranged by H.B. Barnum, gives her a firm, dramatic song of consequences. The title contains the entire verdict. This is no teenage fantasy in which one perfect apology repairs everything. Love sings from the far side of disappointment, where the offending person has finally found the correct words after they have lost their value.
Its reverse side, “If,” travels in another direction. The song comes from an older popular tradition, closer to the formal torch ballad than the latest girl-group single. Love does not shrink her personality to fit it. Instead, she shows how naturally her voice could inhabit adult pop, supper-club drama and the broader American songbook.
Together the two tracks suggest a solo career that could have moved almost anywhere. She had the force for rock and R&B, the control for standards, the church grounding for gospel and the precision required by television and studio work. That range may have been an advantage inside recording sessions and a problem for an industry that preferred one easily repeated identity.
The Many Sides of Love does not manufacture a lost masterpiece from these recordings. Some tracks are stronger than others, and their changing production styles make the collection feel more like a recovered file than a unified album. That is part of its appeal. It documents a career that existed in pieces because the business itself kept dividing the singer from her name.
The bonus tracks allow those pieces to reconnect across several decades.
Love’s 1985 recording of “River Deep, Mountain High” came from her performance in the Broadway musical Leader of the Pack, built around the songs of Ellie Greenwich. The choice contains a deep historical loop. Love and the Blossoms had sung backing vocals on Tina Turner’s monumental original recording. Nearly twenty years later, Love stepped forward to sing the song herself, produced by Greenwich and Bob Crewe.
Her performance does not attempt to erase Tina Turner from the song. Nothing could. Instead, it reveals how naturally the composition fits another singer built for emotional altitude. Love understands that “River Deep, Mountain High” cannot be approached cautiously. The song is a mountain-climbing machine. She enters at full commitment and lets the gospel muscle in her voice meet its impossible scale.
Leader of the Pack was also central to her return to public view. By then, Love had lived through career interruptions, family responsibilities and periods of severe financial strain. She has told the story of cleaning houses in Beverly Hills and hearing “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” on the radio while working. Rather than treating the moment as evidence that her best life was behind her, she took it as a signal to begin again.
The comeback did not happen through a single triumphant door. It came through theater, club work, acting, television and persistence. She appeared in the Lethal Weapon films as Trish Murtaugh, giving millions of viewers a face to know even when many still did not realize they had known her voice for years.
Then “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” created another life for itself. David Letterman invited Love to perform it on his program in 1986, and the appearance became an annual tradition lasting nearly three decades. Each performance rebuilt the song in real time, often with an enormous band, choir, strings, percussion and seasonal chaos gathering behind her. The singer once hidden by false credits became a recurring television event under her own name.
The two versions of “Mr. Fix-It” on this collection come from the musical world surrounding the 1990 film Dick Tracy. Written and produced by Andy Paley, they let Love play with theatrical character, period styling and comic-book atmosphere. One version belongs to contemporary pop production; the “1930s Version” dresses the song in an older costume. Once again, she adapts without vanishing.
The final chronological stop is the most satisfying act of reclamation. In 2014, Bette Midler invited Love to sing “He’s Sure the Boy I Love” with her. This was one of the great Spector records on which Love had sung lead while the label credited the Crystals. More than fifty years later, the song returns with Darlene Love’s name plainly attached.
Midler’s presence adds another layer. She inducted Love into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011, an honor that formally recognized a career the record business had spent decades making difficult to see. Their duet does not sound like a historical correction administered with grim seriousness. It sounds delighted. The record reclaims the past by enjoying it.
That joy is essential to understanding Darlene Love. Her career contains exploitation, missing credit, blocked opportunities and stretches during which the industry behaved as though her voice were valuable but her personhood were negotiable. Yet bitterness is not the primary sound she carries into the room.
The voice keeps moving outward.
Her faith appears to have given her a scale larger than the record business by which to measure her life. She could value a lead performance without believing that being the star was the only honorable position. She could return to background work because it was skilled labor, supported her family and allowed her to continue singing. She could walk away from a destructive session rather than accept humiliation as the price of ambition.
This complicates the familiar story presented by the documentary 20 Feet from Stardom. The distance between a background microphone and center stage is real, especially for Black women whose labor helped construct records that made other people famous. But Darlene Love’s life also shows that the background was not an empty waiting room occupied only by failed stars.
The Blossoms were not incomplete solo artists. They were specialists whose harmony, timing and adaptability shaped the sound of an era. The injustice was not that they performed supporting roles. It was that the industry could use their excellence while hiding names, redirecting credit and treating skilled women as interchangeable components.
The 2022 compilers respond by gathering the evidence. Joe Marchese’s liner notes, Mike Milchner’s remastering and John Sellards’s period-conscious design give these recordings a coherent home without pretending they were originally conceived as one album. The set moves from 1963 studio utility to 1960s girl-group soul, Broadway reclamation, soundtrack theater and a celebratory 2014 duet.
The photographs reinforce the point. On the front, Darlene Love is caught moving, her figure blurred into several possible positions. On the back, the classic Blossoms appear together, smiling beneath a headline promising rare singles. One image refuses to hold Love still. The other restores the group whose work was so often absorbed into somebody else’s record.
Then the Oakland Public Library adds its own markings and places the disc into circulation.
That may be the final side of Love represented here: not star, ghost singer, Blossom, Wildcat, actress or Christmas institution, but discovery. A person can encounter her without planning to, take her home for a few weeks and realize that familiar music history has been missing an entire network of rooms.
James TB found this record because the library selected something he would not have selected for himself. He supplied the physical artifact and the astonishment of discovering what had been hiding behind a famous name. ChatGPT followed the credits and connections through Love’s many working identities and assembled this description.
The collaboration mirrors the CD in a small way. One person brings the object and the lived encounter. Another intelligence follows the trails extending from it. Neither replaces the music, which remains the source sending both of them outward.
Anyone who has recognized Darlene Love’s voice on another unexpected record is welcome to add another doorway. With a singer who spent so much of her life moving through other people’s songs, there are almost certainly more rooms still waiting to be opened.
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