1982 · Behind the Songs
In 1982, Smokey Robinson — who wrote nearly all his own hits — recorded a love song by Gary Goetzman and Mike Piccirillo, and made it sound like his own.
There is an unwritten rule in the Smokey Robinson songbook: the greatest hits are the ones he wrote himself. “The Tracks of My Tears,” “Ooo Baby Baby,” “Cruisin’,” “Being with You” — the pen behind Motown’s poetry belonged to the man singing it. Which is what makes “Old Fashioned Love” such a delicious exception. Released as a single in 1982 from the album Yes It’s You Lady, the song was written not by Robinson but by Gary Goetzman and Mike Piccirillo, two outside writers Motown brought in to keep the hits coming. Smokey didn’t write a word of it — and then he sang it like he had. It is a small record with a big lesson about what makes a singer great.
After “Being with You”
Context is everything. In 1981, Robinson had scored one of the biggest solo hits of his career with “Being with You” — a self-penned ballad that climbed to number two on the Billboard Hot 100. The pressure to follow it was enormous, and Motown made a pragmatic decision: instead of waiting for Smokey to write the next one, they went shopping. The Goetzman-Piccirillo team delivered “Tell Me Tomorrow,” which reached number thirty-three pop and number three R&B — a genuine hit. “Old Fashioned Love,” from the same writers, was chosen as the follow-up single, with hopes of repeating the trick. It was a strategy born of necessity — and it very nearly worked.
The album around it, Yes It’s You Lady, was cut between November and December 1981 at Studio Sound Recorders in North Hollywood, produced by George Tobin in association with Mike Piccirillo and released on Motown’s Tamla label. The album reached number thirty-three pop and number six R&B — solid numbers that nonetheless showed a legend in transition. Even the Smokey-penned title track stalled at number one-hundred-seven on the Hot 100, a sign that the early-eighties marketplace was changing faster than anyone, even Motown’s poet, could follow. In that climate, an old-fashioned love song was either brave or foolhardy — possibly both.
A Love Song, Literally Old-Fashioned
The song is exactly what its title promises: a celebration of old-fashioned romance — devotion, patience, and tenderness in an era that was starting to prize the opposite. What is remarkable is how naturally it sits on Robinson. His tenor, the smoothest instrument in soul music, was built for exactly this kind of material: unhurried, sincere, and romantic without a hint of irony. He sings Goetzman and Piccirillo’s lyric the way he sang his own — finding the ache in the verses, letting the chorus bloom, and making every line sound inevitable. It is the mark of a great interpreter: he doesn’t borrow the song, he adopts it.
Commercially, “Old Fashioned Love” did modest business: number sixty on the Hot 100, number seventeen on the R&B chart, number thirty-two on Cash Box. It didn’t match “Tell Me Tomorrow,” but it kept Robinson visible on R&B radio at a moment when veteran soul singers were being squeezed by changing tastes. For Motown’s core audience, it was a reassuring sound — the poet, still romantic, still smooth, still Smokey. Sometimes holding your ground is its own kind of victory.
The Sound of Early-Eighties Motown
The production tells its own story about Motown in 1982. Tobin and Piccirillo wrapped Robinson’s vocal in the label’s early-eighties signature: smooth soul foundations with a gloss of modern synthesizers, polished but never cold. It was the sound of a legendary company trying to walk into a new decade without losing its soul — literally. Robinson, as always, was the bridge: his voice connected the Motown of “My Girl” to the Motown of the eighties, and “Old Fashioned Love” is one of the clearest examples of that bridge in action. Few singers have ever carried a label’s history in their throat the way Smokey did.
The early eighties were unkind to veteran soul singers on the pop charts — radio had fallen for synthesizers and new wave, and the smooth architects of the seventies suddenly sounded like yesterday. But R&B radio remembered. Stations that had grown up on Smokey kept playing Smokey, and “Old Fashioned Love” gave them something fresh to play: a record that honored the past without sounding like a museum piece. Its number seventeen R&B peak was a quiet victory — proof that the audience Motown had built over two decades wasn’t going anywhere.
What to Listen For
There is a lovely irony at the heart of the record: a song called “Old Fashioned Love,” celebrating old-fashioned romance, dressed in the newest sounds 1982 had to offer. What to listen for: the way Robinson’s vocal floats above the synthesizers, untouched by them — the past and the present in the same frame. Listen for the unhurried phrasing, the way he lingers on the title phrase as if tasting it, and the warmth that no amount of studio gloss can manufacture. That warmth is the whole argument of the song.
And that, finally, is why the record endures: not because it was a hit — it barely was — but because it was honest, and honesty, sung by Smokey Robinson, never goes out of style. Some songs chase the moment; this one simply outlasted it.
In the vastness of Smokey Robinson’s catalog, “Old Fashioned Love” will never be the first name mentioned — but it deserves its quiet corner. It is proof that genius isn’t only about writing; it’s about hearing. Robinson heard something in Goetzman and Piccirillo’s song that its writers might not have heard themselves, and he gave it back to them transformed. For a man who wrote the book on love songs, it was a gracious footnote: even the poet laureate of Motown sometimes loved singing someone else’s poetry. That is the very definition of old-fashioned love.