I Hear a Symphony

The orchestral introduction arrives like a curtain rising, strings sweeping upward with a theatricality that immediately signals this is not a typical pop record — this is a song that believes in its own grandeur and earns it completely. Florence Ballard and Mary Wilson provide the foundation, voices warm and steady beneath Diana Ross's lead, and her performance here is perhaps the most purely joyful thing she ever recorded, the sheer wonder in her delivery of a woman discovering that love feels like stumbling into a piece of music. Holland-Dozier-Holland constructed this as a song about synesthesia almost — the experience of emotion so intense it spills into other senses, where happiness sounds like an orchestra only you can hear. The tempo has a waltz-like lilt that gives it a floating quality, never quite landing fully on the earth, always a half-step above it. It captures the specific delirium of early love — not the anxious, obsessive kind, but the radiant, almost disbelieving kind — and the production matches that feeling exactly, strings and voices rising together until the whole thing feels genuinely transcendent. Put this on when the afternoon light is golden and everything, briefly, seems possible.