Higher and Higher

This is music built like a rocket — it starts with intention and just keeps ascending. The arrangement begins modestly enough, a tight rhythm section and horns that suggest purpose, but Jackie Wilson seizes it and pulls it upward by sheer force of personality. His voice is one of the great athletic instruments in American popular music: capable of leaping registers, sustaining notes that seem physically impossible, moving between delicacy and power within the same breath. The song's subject is simple — transcendence through love, the feeling that the world has opened up — but Wilson makes the abstraction physical. You can feel the lift. The production, lush but not cluttered, gives his voice room to do what it does, which is essentially perform the miracle the lyric describes. This is soul music from the late sixties, a period when the genre was at peak confidence, when singers like Wilson were proving that the voice alone could be an entire event. Put this on when you need momentum, when you are trying to believe that something good is on the other side of whatever you are pushing through. It works especially well at high volume in a moving vehicle.