I’m not sure what real love is, but Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson had a pretty good go at describing it in “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”.
Husband and wife team Ashford and Simpson were one of the best songwriting teams of the latter half of the 20th century, with hits like “You’re All I Need To Get By” and “Reach Out And Touch (Somebody’s Hand)”. But they’re hardly household names nowadays, which is a great shame.
Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson both started out as performers themselves and had hits of their own too, probably most famously “Solid” in the early 1980s. (If you were around at the time you might remember the “Solid as a rock” refrain from that song more than the title itself.) But they really hit pay-dirt when they wrote “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”.
Perhaps because they were both vocalists themselves, Ashford and Simpson had a nice line in duets. Their style definitely suited Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, who recorded the original version of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”.
The wonderful thing about their recording is that, even though all the parts were recorded separately, the final result doesn’t sound like it was done that way at all.
Tammi Terrell recorded her section first, then Marvin Gaye wrapped his vocal around hers to make it sound like both vocals had been recorded together live. If you’re thinking “how hard can that be?” the answer is “just about as hard as anything you can possibly imagine”.
Singing the words in time to some notes on a page isn’t especially difficult for a professional singer, admittedly. That’s what they do every day.
But doing it in such a way as to weave their vocal seamlessly around a pre-recorded vocal from another artist and make it such an intimate experience that listeners would think Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell had recorded “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” together in the studio while gazing lovingly into one another’s eyes…well that’s about as hard as it gets in the world of music. From: https://nowordsnosong.medium.com/aint-no-mountain-high-enough-marvyn-gaye-and-tammi-terrell-diana-ross-23c9fa471ded
