Willie Hutch: I Choose You

It’s a late night driving back over the bay bridge. There’s dust on the windshield. My housemate and I are driving back from backyard get together, housewarming for our mutual friend. Curtis Mayfield runs out of notes to sing and the algorithm finds our vibe, bounces us through a few 70’s crooners before we land on a song I can’t believe I don’t know: Willie Hutch’s “I Choose You.”

Every struggle, every journey, every injury I got to the other side of, they all comprise a mountain that Willie and his full goddamn orchestra climb in ten short seconds. Then we arrive.  A chorus of angels opens up, unfolding over a laid-back shuffling groove. “I Choose You,” they say and repeat. Willie joins them, unravelling those same words even higher, even longer. The horn section keeps us moving. The race is over, but we’re not stopping. We’re taking a victory lap, one that might just last the rest of our lives. 

This song should be an entire genre. I wish there was some word to catch songs like these, the fully-scored soulful anthems that freeze time and turn every streetlight and sidewalk into a cinematic scroll. But closest points of reference are a patchwork. Sam Cooke can croon like no other, but never delivered up such a sweet sense of victory. And Willie calls to mind something older: those golden-age Hollywood soundtracks, threaded through with orchestral swells and worshipful choruses, nostalgic from the day they screened. Beautiful, careful, but without Willie’s heart.

I’ve seen and heard snatches from those old movies, the Turner Classics left on when I was a kid, forever nameless and impossible to recall these decades later. That was a time where movies meant choreography. I remember sparkling costumes and tense-looking actors. I didn’t want to feel the way they looked, but I definitely wanted to feel the way they sounded. I remember that feeling, all those strings and voices swelling in perfect sync, but I don’t remember a single song. I don’t know where to find music that feels that way. I’m not even sure that music would still make me feel that way. 

But I now know how to find Willie Hutch. That’s a man with a name. He’s got his photo on the front of the album cover, mugging the camera, impassive and stoic. What are you trying to tell us, Willie? I don’t see a single note of tenderness in that photo. Maybe some pain, though. All his album covers have that distance, whether it’s a tight portrait or a composed scene, he’s giving us nothing. No emotions to sell. Whatever he’s feeling, he’s pretty reluctant to share.

Even the lyrics feel distant on paper. He’s not describing love, he’s describing a woman’s marriageability. He’s assessed the situation and decided she’s the one for him. “It’s you I learned to love.” Heartless. The closest he comes to saying how he feels is, “Oh I feel real bright.” 

I looked up the movie and now I see why. “I Choose You” is a standout single on the soundtrack for “The Mack,” a critically panned blaxploitation movie. Willie penned this song specifically for the movie. It plays over a very painful two-minute scene in which Mack, the protagonist, is standing by the dock with his old friend Lulu, a beautiful woman who turned to prostitution. He’s telling her about his big dreams, about how his biggest problem in life has always been about “finding the right road to get to that rainbow that everyone talks about.” Their conversation is all about him. He shares his ambition, his dreams. He sweet talks her, smiles, caresses, tells her she’s just got to trust him, he’ll be her everything, and that everything he asks her to do is for the best for both of them. They kiss.

To Mack, she’s a means to an ends.

So Willie split the difference in his lyrics. The song is pragmatic, a little heartless, but you could choose to believe it. It might be genuine. Maybe you really will make it to the rainbow together, if you just stick with Willie. Maybe he really will stick with you too.

But then, just listen to the track and all those doubts don’t matter any more. Everything is real. This is it. Whatever you’ve been looking for, however impossible it’s seemed, it’s here, you’ve got it in your arms, and for the next three minutes and forty one seconds it’s all yours. 

I don’t resonate at all with this snatch of a scene from a presumably awful movie, but boy do I feel what Willie’s putting out on tape. That feeling, feeling like you’ve made it, doesn’t always come when you think. It’s given to you. It’s a sum of circumstance, hard work, and other people acknowledging and inviting you in. It’s an award, a kiss, a proud handshake, a champagne toast. You can plan as hard as you want, but you can’t own any of those moments. They’re shared. Someone else is there, someone on your side. Together, you’ve faced the world, and for a moment, you’ve won.

It’s the only song of Willie’s that makes me feel this way. So strange he made it about a choice he might not even believe in.

I wish I could un-know the context for this song. I wish I knew how to find it--and all the other songs that make me feel this way--without knowing about the awful plot, the exploitative working conditions, the anxieties and addictions the artists faced. It would make these songs easier to love. 

But then again we all have a past. If those warts and creases make things a little harder to romanticize, at least they are a reminder we’re looking at something real.

So Willie’s song, even though you showed me a glimpse of the rainbow and then took it away, I choose you.