Some hit songs are laboured over for months. Feel Like Makin’ Love began as a sentence spoken on a doorstep. In the early 1970s the singer-songwriter Eugene McDaniels had lent his in-laws’ cabin at Lake Arrowhead, California, to himself, his family and his assistant, Morgan Ames, for a short break. After a single day, Ames announced she was leaving. Asked why, she answered plainly: she had to get back to town — she felt like making love. McDaniels waved her off, sat down, and wrote one of the defining slow grooves of the decade in well under an hour.
The song would become Roberta Flack’s third American number one in three years, a feat no solo woman had ever managed before. But between the cabin doorstep and the top of the Billboard Hot 100 lay an unlikely chain of events: a protest songwriter turned sensualist, a singer who seized the producer’s chair under a false name, and a record so direct about desire that it quietly redrew what a female artist could say on the radio in 1974.
The Protest Singer Who Wrote It
Eugene McDaniels had already lived several musical lives before he wrote the song. As Gene McDaniels he had been a clean-cut pop star of the early 1960s, scoring hits with A Hundred Pounds of Clay and Tower of Strength. By the end of that decade he had reinvented himself as one of soul music’s most uncompromising voices, writing Compared to What — the furious jazz-standard indictment recorded by Les McCann and Eddie Harris, and later by Flack herself on her debut album First Take — and releasing the psychedelic protest album Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse in 1971.
Flack knew his work intimately. She had recorded his Reverend Lee on her second album, Chapter Two, and regarded him as a mentor figure from her earliest days at Atlantic Records. When McDaniels rang her about the new song, she did not wait for a demo tape to cross the country. She flew to Los Angeles, rode with him up to Lake Arrowhead — the same mountain town where the song had sparked — and the two of them worked on it together for several days, shaping its unhurried, circling mood before she ever stood in front of a studio microphone.
Rubina Flake Takes the Chair
The recording, made at Bell Sound Studios in New York, became a turning point in Flack’s career for a reason that had nothing to do with her singing. Her long association with producer Joel Dorn had ended, and the sessions for her new album were hers to steer. When an early mix of the song failed to satisfy her, Flack rejected it and finished the record herself — her debut as a producer — hiding behind a pseudonym in the credits: *Rubina Flake*.
The disguise was only half a joke. Atlantic’s executives were nervous about an artist, still less a woman artist, producing her own sessions, and the false name let the work be judged on its sound alone. What Flack — sorry, Flake — built was a masterclass in restraint: a slow, humid pulse, electric piano rippling underneath, and her own voice placed so close to the listener that the performance feels confided rather than performed. Pianist Bob James, hired to play on the session, was so taken with the tune he heard that day that he recorded his own version soon afterwards for his album One — a version that would become a jazz-funk staple in its own right. By most accounts, Flack’s lead vocal on the master was captured in a single take.
A Song With Nothing to Hide
Part of the record’s shock, in the summer of 1974, was its plainness. McDaniels’ lyric offers no metaphor and no apology: a walk in the park, winter turning to spring, a lover’s voice low in the dark — and then the title, stated outright. Soul music had been candid before, but a woman of Flack’s elegance and classical training singing so unadorned a declaration of desire, in a voice barely above a murmur, was something new on mainstream radio. Radio played it anyway. It was simply too graceful to refuse.
That tension — between the song’s radical directness and its absolute composure — is the whole secret of the record. Flack never raises her voice, never pleads, never performs passion. The groove does the work: five patient minutes in which nothing is hurried and everything is certain. It is the sound of an artist completely in control, made by a woman who had just taken control of her own recordings for the first time.
Three Summers, Three Number Ones
Atlantic released the single in the early summer of 1974, months ahead of the album that would share its name. On the chart dated 10 August 1974, Feel Like Makin’ Love replaced John Denver’s Annie’s Song at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. It also topped the R&B chart — where it held for weeks — and the Easy Listening chart, and it was certified gold that same August. In topping the Hot 100, Flack completed a sequence nobody had achieved before her: a solo female artist at number one in three consecutive years, following The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face in 1972 and Killing Me Softly with His Song in 1973.
The album Feel Like Makin’ Love did not arrive until March 1975, nearly a year after its title song had conquered radio — a measure of how completely the single had taken on a life of its own. The record earned Flack three Grammy nominations, for Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, even if it carried none of them home.
The Weight She Carried Into the Studio
It is worth pausing on where Flack stood when she took that producer’s chair. She arrived at the Feel Like Makin’ Love sessions as the most decorated singer in American pop: the winner of the Grammy for Record of the Year in two consecutive years — for The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face in 1973 and Killing Me Softly with His Song in 1974, a back-to-back feat no artist had ever achieved. Atlantic wanted the streak protected. Flack, who had been a schoolteacher and a classical pianist before she was a star, wanted something else: a record that moved, in her own later description, without too much sentimental feeling — desire rendered with a musician’s discipline rather than a diva’s display.
That discipline is why the single could precede its album by the better part of a year without the campaign collapsing. The album Feel Like Makin’ Love, when it finally arrived in March 1975, showed the same artist’s hand everywhere — down to its thirteen-minute centrepiece, I Can See the Sun in Late December, written for her by Stevie Wonder. The hit single had been no accident of a producer’s formula. It was the calling card of a self-produced album by an artist who had decided that the safest pair of hands for Roberta Flack’s music was Roberta Flack’s.
The Song That Kept Coming Back
Other singers reached for the song almost immediately. In 1974 alone, versions appeared from Roy Ayers, Johnny Mathis, Lou Rawls and Gladys Knight & the Pips — and from McDaniels himself. George Benson recorded it, Bob James built an album track around it, and a generation later D’Angelo slowed it down still further on his debut album Brown Sugar, introducing the song to the neo-soul era. Few compositions of the decade have been reinterpreted so often while remaining so completely identified with their first interpreter.
That is the paradox at the heart of Feel Like Makin’ Love. It is one of the most covered songs of its era, yet nobody has ever displaced Roberta Flack’s version — the version she rescued from an unsatisfying mix and finished under a borrowed name, in a single unhurried take, from a song a friend had named out loud on her way out of a cabin door. Sometimes a classic is not written so much as overheard.
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