Let's Get It On

Recorded between 1970 and 1973 at Hitsville U.S.A. and Golden World in Detroit and Hitsville West in Los Angeles, and released on Tamla on 28 August 1973. The title song was the album's first recording, written with Ed Townsend, who co-produced the first four tracks. While making it Gaye decided to revive unfinished recordings from his 1970 sessions, and these make up much of the rest. Most of the playing came from the Funk Brothers, including James Jamerson, with Gaye on piano and singing all the backing vocals except on Just to Keep You Satisfied, where the Originals sing. In the liner notes Gaye wrote that he saw nothing wrong with sex between consenting anybodies, and hoped the music would make the listener lucky.

The album reached number two on the Billboard Top LPs, behind the Rolling Stones' Goats Head Soup, spent 61 weeks on the chart and was the best-selling soul album of 1973. It passed What's Going On as his best seller at Motown. Come Get to This reached 23 on the Hot 100 and You Sure Love to Ball 50. Jon Landau of Rolling Stone wrote that it lacked the earlier album's series of high points but that Gaye's performance retrieved it, and Jason Ankeny of AllMusic called it one of the most sexually charged albums ever recorded. Rolling Stone ranked it 165 in 2003 and 422 in 2023, and it entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2004. A 50th anniversary edition in August 2023 added 33 bonus tracks, 18 of them unreleased.