Back Stabbers

Back Stabbers ends with Love Train. The apparent contradiction is a useful entrance to the O’Jays’ 1972 album, but it is not the whole journey. Between the famous singles lie longer songs, questions and arguments. Starting with When the World’s at Peace and reaching the brief final invitation gives those opposing attitudes room to coexist.

Eddie Levert, Walter Williams and William Powell were not making a debut. This was a major Philadelphia International turning point for an established group. Nor should the production partnership erase differences in songwriting: the title song credits Gene McFadden, John Whitehead and Leon Huff, with Thom Bell arranging; Love Train belongs to Kenny Gamble and Huff. The shared sound includes distinct contributions.

Drama before the first voice

Huff told Fresh Air that he played the opening piano of Back Stabbers and intended its gesture to reflect the subject’s drama. Listen to that entrance before treating the strings as shorthand for comfortable luxury. Piano, rhythm and vocal arrival can establish a scene. The title song occupies the second position, following an opening track that already imagines peace.

Time spent between the singles

Who Am I lasts more than five minutes, while 992 Arguments opens the programme’s second half at approximately six minutes. Those expanses distinguish the album from a parade of compact singles. The transition out of Time to Get Down changes both scale and subject. Listen to the Clock on the Wall and Shiftless, Shady, Jealous Kind of People extend the attention to unsettled human relationships.

An invitation after suspicion

Love Train follows Sunshine and finishes in about three minutes. Its invitation need not function as a tidy cure for everything preceding it. The sequencing allows collective possibility to remain imaginable after private disappointment. Gamble’s interview description of orchestral countermelodies also suggests a listening approach: follow several musical lines, not just a luxurious frame around a principal voice. Each line can retain its own direction.