For the First Time On Vinyl: Bonus Cuts and Alternate Takes from Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man Session, Previously featured On the 40th Anniversary Expanded Edition.

By the early 1970s, Marvin Gaye was very much his own man, making music only on his terms. Especially after the massive success of his 1971 landmark album What’s Going On, and the not inconsiderable matter of a new $1 million deal with Motown that gave him greater creative control than he’d ever had. What Gaye did next, far from trying to repeat the sound of his last album, was to branch out into a movie soundtrack.

Now in full production control and writing almost all of the material himself, Gaye seized the opportunity to write for the movie Trouble Man, a low-budget blaxploitation crime thriller starring Robert Hooks and directed by Ivan Dixon, which hoped to follow in the footsteps of Shaft, Superfly and other successes. If the picture is little remembered today, the soundtrack has outlived it and stands tall as a rather underrated part of Gaye’s body of work. It’s also the perfect change of pace in between the ecologically aware What’s Going On and the romantically focused Let’s Get It On of just nine months later.

For the first time on vinyl, More Trouble features bonus cuts and alternate takes from Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man session, previously featured on the 40th anniversary expanded edition.