Love and Happiness – Al Green

Reverend Al Green is my favorite soul singer of all time, with his Greatest Hits album (what an iconic cover, by the way) being on regular rotation year-round for me. Nobody is really able to do it like Al, and while I’m sure everyone knows this song already, give it another listen! You won’t regret it! “Love and Happiness” will never not get me moving.

The opening guitar riff from this song is one of my all timers, really the guitar throughout this song is one of my favorites to focus in on. It’s not super flashy by any means but the tone that Teenie Hodges is able to pull off is so nice and homey. Teenie was Al’s main guitar player and is featured on a ton of Al’s huge hits, and actually co wrote “Love and Happiness” with the Rev. The bass line is pretty standard, but the keys really make this song more me. This whole song is just perfection.

One of my favorite things is finding so called “easter eggs” in music, little stuff in recordings that aren’t technically suppose to be there, or rather little things that would be removed by modern technolgy. A somewhat weak example of this, but very cool none the less, is the count in on this song is actually Teenie stepping on a Coca-Cola crate. In his autobiography, Al says this song is all about the timing and to know it all started with a coke crate is pretty cool to me.

Link to Audio – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8AMZmWqgRM

Link to live – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVMijYHnbGw