Hope She'll Be Happier

Withers wrote it. The studio version runs 3:49 on the LP; a live version from Carnegie Hall on October 6, 1972, about 4:26, appears on Live at Carnegie Hall in 1973. A rock-blog appreciation reads it as a man in grief over losing his partner, unable to grasp why she left, who hopes she will be happier with someone new, with a nice guitar figure repeated over a passionate vocal. Mark Anthony Neal wrote for NPR that it revealed what would become a common theme in his music: that love will always be lost and that a dark side few wanted to acknowledge would be present.

The Zaire 74 film Soul Power lists Withers performing it in Kinshasa in September 1974, with just guitar and voice according to the same blog. James Blake's "Radio Silence" (2016) is built around a lyric from this song, which was never credited, and Stereogum notes his album opens with two lines from it. A claim that Blake covered the song in 2014 is not supported. Our upload is presumably the studio track.