One voice can wish upon a star, the lyric argues, but it takes two to make a dream come true. “It Takes Two” is the simplest of ideas built into one of the most consequential records of Marvin Gaye’s career. It was not his first duet, and it would soon be eclipsed by his legendary partnership with Tammi Terrell — but it was the record that proved the formula: two voices, trading lines and finishing each other’s phrases, could turn a good Motown song into an event. Released at the end of 1966 with the underrated Kim Weston, it became Gaye’s most successful duet single to that point, his first real breakthrough in Britain, and a template durable enough to be revived, nearly a quarter-century later, by Rod Stewart and Tina Turner.
A husband, a hitmaker and a list of things better in pairs
The song came from inside the family, literally. It was written by Sylvia Moy and William “Mickey” Stevenson — and Stevenson was both Kim Weston’s husband and one of the most important men at Motown. As the label’s head of A&R, Stevenson had helped shape its sound and its roster; as a producer and songwriter, he was a long-standing Gaye collaborator. Moy, one of the company’s finest staff writers, knew how to build a lyric out of a catalogue, and together they constructed “It Takes Two” as exactly that: a list of things in life — dreams, love, wishes — that work better with two people than with one.
The structure was a gift to a duet. Each line hands the thought from one singer to the other, so the record itself demonstrates its own argument. Stevenson produced the track with Henry Cosby, and the sessions spread across the turn of the year: November 27 and December 6, 1965, and March 2, 1966, in Detroit. Behind the singers, the Funk Brothers and members of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra supplied the arrangement — strings and swagger together, the classic mid-sixties Motown blend. The song first reached the public as the title track of the duo’s album Take Two, released on August 25, 1966, where it sat among standards like “‘Til There Was You” and “Secret Love” — the latter graced by backing vocals from the Spinners — and Holland-Dozier-Holland’s “Baby I Need Your Loving”. Only then, on December 4, 1966, was it issued as a single in its own right, with “It’s Got to Be a Miracle (This Thing Called Love)” on the B-side.
Gaye had sung duets before — with Mary Wells in 1964, and on singles with both Weston and Oma Heard — but those records had flickered rather than caught fire. Their earlier pairing, “What Good Am I Without You”, had managed only a modest showing in 1964, though it earned a place on the Take Two album. This time the chemistry and the song matched. Weston deserved her shot: born Agatha Nathalia Weston in Detroit, she had signed to Motown in 1961, scored an early hit with “Love Me All the Way”, and by 1965 had cut one of the great lost classics of the label, “Take Me in Your Arms (Rock Me a Little While)”, a number four R&B hit later covered by everyone from the Isley Brothers to the Doobie Brothers and Phil Collins, followed by the top-twenty R&B success of “Helpless”. On “It Takes Two” she meets Gaye line for line without ever being overpowered, and he, in turn, sounds delighted rather than merely romantic. Cash Box caught the mood exactly, calling it a “rhythmic, infectious romancer that superbly matches the two fine voices.”
Why the record works
Part of the song’s durability is in its construction. Moy and Stevenson were staff professionals writing to a brief — showcase both singers equally — and they solved it with a lyric built like a relay race. Almost every image arrives in two halves: one can have a dream, but the dreaming means little alone; a wish needs a second voice to carry it. Gaye opens lines, Weston answers them, and by the choruses the two are braided together, so the arrangement itself keeps restating the title. Underneath, the Funk Brothers give the record a dancer’s bounce rather than a ballad’s sway, and the Detroit Symphony strings sweeten it for pop radio. It is three minutes long, it never slows down, and it leaves both singers sounding like the luckiest people in Detroit. Stevenson, who as A&R chief had spent years matching material to voices across the whole roster, had essentially written a demonstration record for the duet format itself — proof, pressed into vinyl, that Motown romance was a two-handed art.
A hit on three charts — and a first for Britain
The record moved quickly once it was out. In January 1967 it peaked at number 14 on the Billboard pop chart and number four on the soul singles chart, and it crowned the duet album a genuine success. Just as significant was what happened overseas: “It Takes Two” gave Gaye his first major hit in the United Kingdom, reaching number 16 on the British singles chart in the spring of 1967 and topping Record Mirror‘s British R&B chart. For an artist who would soon become a giant in Britain, this was the door opening.
The record travelled, too. It reached number 14 in Canada, matching its American peak, and found audiences in the Netherlands and Belgium — respectable numbers for a Motown single of the period, and early evidence that the Gaye duet sound was exportable. In the sequence of Gaye’s own singles it sits at a telling junction: it followed the solo hit “Little Darling (I Need You)” and came immediately before “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”, the first of the Terrell collaborations. Heard in that order, the three records tell the story of a singer discovering, single by single, that his voice did its most memorable work when it had another voice to answer it.
Yet the partnership was already ending. Weston left Motown in 1967 and later sued the company over royalties — a grievance many Hitsville artists would come to share — and she and Stevenson moved to Los Angeles, where he ran a label for MGM and she cut singles that went largely unpromoted. Her finest later moment came with “Lift Every Voice and Sing”, the Black national anthem, featured in the film Wattstax with its proceeds donated to the United Negro College Fund; decades on, she was inducted into the inaugural class of the Official Rhythm & Blues Music Hall of Fame in 2013. But her Motown moment closed just as her finest record for the label was peaking.
The duet crown passed almost immediately — and directly because of this record. It was the success of “It Takes Two”, Weston’s biographies flatly state, that caused Motown to partner Gaye with Tammi Terrell. Within months the new pairing had released “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”, and “Your Precious Love” and the rest carried the format to heights “It Takes Two” had only pointed at. The song is therefore a hinge in Gaye’s story — the last record of his early duet experiments and the first proof of what the mature ones would become.
The song that keeps finding partners
Like its lyric, the song proved to be built for two at a time, indefinitely. The first to notice were Otis Redding and Carla Thomas, whose 1967 Stax duet album King & Queen was openly influenced by Gaye’s duet records; it became Redding’s final studio album before his death that December. In 1989 a charity remake, retitled “It Takes Two, Baby”, was released for Children in Need with BBC Radio 1 DJs Liz Kershaw and Bruno Brookes alongside Jive Bunny and Londonbeat, reaching number 53 in Britain.
Then came the full-scale revival. In November 1990, Rod Stewart and Tina Turner released their version, produced by Chic’s Bernard Edwards, fronting a Pepsi advertising campaign and leading Stewart’s album Vagabond Heart. It topped the chart in Denmark, reached number five in the UK and number four in Ireland and Italy, and hit the top ten across Europe — two veteran superstars, consciously reprising the roles Gaye and Weston had created twenty-four years earlier. The revival earned its place on both singers’ defining compilations, Turner’s Simply the Best in 1991 and Stewart’s The Very Best of Rod Stewart a decade later, quietly certifying “It Takes Two” as a standard that now belonged to two generations of duettists at once. The original kept working its way into films, too, playing over the closing credits of the 1995 film It Takes Two and the ending of Hot Shots! Part Deux, and in the streaming era the Gaye–Weston recording has earned a UK Silver certification.
It is easy to overlook “It Takes Two” between the epochal records that surround it — the Grapevine saga behind it, the Terrell duets and What’s Going On ahead. But every Motown love duet that followed, every traded line and intertwined chorus, is walking a road this record paved: the discovery that at Hitsville, romance sounded best when it took two.