“Expressway to Your Heart” was the first Top 40 hit not only for the band, but also for its producers, a pair of ambitious Philadelphians named Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff. Gamble and Huff would go on to develop the silky sound of Philadelphia soul, perhaps the single greatest musical style to reach America’s radios in the Seventies. (Think “Love Train,” “Me and Mrs. Jones” and “If You Don’t Know Me By Now,” just for starters.) They hadn’t found their own sound when “Expressway” came out. It’s pretty much Young Rascals with a twist of Righteous Brothers.
Soul Survivors frontman Charlie Ingui puts a little too much of himself into the “much too crowded!” vamping after the first verse. As a result, he sounds like he’s fighting to get most of the second verse out of his throat. Sinatra used to call those moments of hoarseness “coughing up a Chesterfield;” Ingui’s second verse sounds like he brought up a half-pack of king-size. And yet, it works, in an impassioned sort of way.
Now, you can’t have a Young Rascals-style white-soul single without the Hammond organ any more than you can have clam sauce without garlic. But the main keyboard instrument on “Expressway” is the driving piano that carries the riff, and that needs to come through loud and clear. So G&H found creative uses for their Hammond player, who lays out in the first verse; drops in to support the breakdown (“I was wrong / It took too long”); and then leans on every two-beat during the second verse, further accentuating the work being done by the snare drum. The listener receives his or her required dose of soulful organ without ever really noticing it, like the vitamins that are baked into bread. From: https://neckpickup.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/five-for-the-record-the-soul-survivors-expressway-to-your-heart/
