The Records That Wait
Hidden Album: Donny Hathaway, Extension of a Man, and the music only time can finish
By Rafi Mercer
A record doesn't change. That's the first thing to understand about it, and the easiest to forget. The grooves cut in a New York studio in 1972 are the same grooves today, the same depth and the same spiral. Put the needle down and the same air comes out of the speakers. Whatever changes, it isn't the record.
This morning a French album from 1996 sounded completely different from how I remembered it. It sounded like a freer time, a Europe that took its open doors for granted. The music hadn't moved an inch. Everything round it had.
Then I found another, and it took the thought somewhere I hadn't expected.
Painters know this story better than musicians. Van Gogh famously sold almost nothing in his lifetime. The canvases that now hang behind glass and alarm wires were stacked against walls, given away, traded for meals. The paintings didn't get better after he died. The world simply caught up with them, and by then there was nobody left to tell.
There's an uncomfortable arithmetic to it. An artist dies and the work becomes finite. Nothing more will be added, so everything already made carries more weight. The market calls that value. I've never been sure what to call it. But records are not paintings. They're pressed by the thousand and sold in shops. Scarcity isn't what changes their worth. Something else is going on, and I think it's this: some records are made ahead of their listeners. They have to wait for us.
Donny Hathaway released Extension of a Man on 18 June 1973. He was twenty-seven. He had grown up singing in church in St. Louis, raised by his grandmother, then studied at Howard University before the music business came calling. By 1973 he'd had real success. The duets with Roberta Flack had gone gold, "Where Is the Love" was all over the radio, and his live album caught a man at the piano who could turn a club into a congregation. Atlantic wanted more of the same.
He gave them an orchestra instead.
The record opens with a six-minute symphonic piece, "I Love the Lord; He Heard My Cry", with no singing for a long time, just strings, horns and a choir finding their way to the light. What follows ranges from city soul to Latin jazz, blues and easy listening, with an instrumental called "Valdez in the Country" that musicians have been learning by ear ever since. Arif Mardin produced it. The players were the best in New York. The title tells you what he was doing: extending himself in every direction at once, past anything a soul singer was supposed to be.
It didn't land the way the duets had. A couple of singles grazed the charts, and that was largely that.
There was something else happening too, something the listeners at the time couldn't hear. Hathaway was ill. Around this time he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and the years that followed were broken ones. His friend and collaborator Edward Howard wrote the words to the album's second track with Donny in mind, for and about the pain he could see his friend living through. It's a song of encouragement, written by one man to another and sung by the man it was meant for.
Take it from me, someday we'll all be free.
Donny Hathaway died in New York in January 1979. He was thirty-three.
And then the song started to move. Aretha Franklin sang it. Over the years it became something people reached for when they needed to say that a hard time would end. Days after September 2001, Alicia Keys sat at a piano on a national broadcast and sang it to a country in shock. His daughter Lalah recorded it. Amy Winehouse named him in one of her biggest songs. A B-side, the flip of a single called "Love, Love, Love", turned into an anthem nobody had commissioned.
The record didn't change. The words were always there. What changed was that enough people had now lived through enough to hear them properly, and they knew what had happened to the man singing. It's hard to admit, but they're part of the same thing. Once you know the ending, every line sounds different, the hope in it most of all.
This is the shape of the hidden album, and it's broader than one man's story. Nick Drake recorded Pink Moon over two late nights in October 1971, just him, his guitar and one piano part, twenty-eight minutes long. Island released it in February 1972. It sold fewer than five thousand copies. Drake died in 1974, at twenty-six. For a quarter of a century the record belonged to a small number of people who passed it between them like a secret. One of them had bought it in the seventies and kept it. Years later he worked at an advertising agency, and in 1999 he put the title track into a car commercial. Within a couple of years Pink Moon went from selling around six thousand copies a year to more than seventy thousand.
The record didn't change. It had been waiting for one listener to carry it far enough.
So time finishes records in different ways. Sometimes it's a death, which puts a weight on everything that came before. Sometimes it's a stranger who refuses to let a record go. And sometimes the world itself moves and leaves a record standing in a new light, like that French album from 1996, whose maker is very much alive, but whose easy, open-hearted Europe now sounds like a letter from somewhere we've left.
None of these records was lost. They were held back by the people listening, who weren't ready for them yet. The industry wanted the hit, critics wanted the familiar, and the rest of us were busy. The music sat there complete, waiting for the listener to grow into it.
What troubles me is who it arrives too late for. Hathaway never heard his song become what it became. Drake never saw the sales figures. The value turned up in the end, as it does with paintings, and found nobody at the address.
I think about that in listening bars, and on the last Sunday of the month when the Club gathers and a record plays all the way through without anyone talking over it. That kind of attention is about the only thing that can close the gap. If you listen properly now, to the strange record, the overreaching one, the one that doesn't sound like the last hit, it doesn't have to wait for an obituary to be heard. It's a gentle rebellion against the way the world usually gets round to its best music.
Most of us won't change how history treats a record. We can change how long it waits in our own house.
Somewhere there's a copy of Extension of a Man with the orchestra still asleep in the first groove. The record hasn't changed since 1973.
We have, and that's the only reason it sounds different now.
When was Extension of a Man released, and why didn't it do better at the time?
Donny Hathaway released Extension of a Man on Atco on 18 June 1973. It was his last solo studio album, produced by Arif Mardin. Its range, from an orchestral opener to Latin jazz and city soul, was a long way from the duet hits audiences expected, and it sold modestly. Its reputation has grown steadily since, particularly through "Someday We'll All Be Free."
What does Tracks & Tales mean by a "Hidden Album"?
A Hidden Album is a record that was never really lost. It was held back by timing, industry priorities or listeners who weren't ready for it. The series looks at why a record waited and what finally let it be heard, whether that was an artist's death, a devoted fan or a change in the world around it.
What is The Listening Club?
The Listening Club is the Tracks & Tales monthly listening session. One album is played in full on vinyl, online, on the last Sunday of every month, and members join from wherever they are in the world. The record comes first and the conversation comes after.
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