to soulful screams near the end; from a heartbroken croon to an impassioned wail. The song's lyrics chronicled the yearning its narrator feels for a lover who is "so many miles away", as he pleads for her return and laments the emptiness he feels without her. Music writer Donarld A. Guarisco later wrote of the song's sound, in that "Marvin Gaye's studio recording enhances the dreamy style of the song with stately horn and strings, tumbling drum fills that gently nudge the song along, and mellow, doo wop-styled background vocals that echo "love her, you love her" under his romantic pleas. The song later became a concert favorite for Gaye and a live concert version, featuring female fans screaming in the background, was released as a single from his Marvin Gaye Live! album in 1974. "You Sure Love to Ball" is one of Gaye's most sexually overt and controversial singles, with its intro and outro featuring moaning sounds made by a man and woman engaged in sex. The sexually-explicit and risqué nature of the album's content were, at the time, controversial, and the recording of such an album was deemed as a commercial risk by Motown A&R's (Artists and Repertoire) and label executives. Marketing and sales Released on August 28, 1973, Let's Get It On surpassed Gaye's previous studio effort, What's Going On, as the best-selling record of his tenure with Motown. The album peaked at number two on the US Billboard Top LPs chart, behind The Rolling Stones's Goats Head Soup (1973), while it also managed to reach number one in Cash Box for one week, as well as two weeks at the top of Record Worlds music charts. Let's Get It On charted for 61 weeks on the Billboard charts, and remained at the top of the Billboard Soul Albums for 11 weeks, becoming the best-selling soul album of 1973. Two of the album's singles reached the top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100, including "Let's Get It On", which became Gaye's second number-one US single, and the top-30 hit "Come Get to This", which peaked at number 23 on the chart. The album's third single, "You Sure Love to Ball", charted at number 50 on the Hot 100 and at number 13 on the Soul Singles chart. Along with the album's music and sexual content, Let's Get It Ons commercial success and promotion helped establish Marvin Gaye