album rating: ★★★★☆
Genre: Southern soul / soul / funk / R&B. It Hurts So Good is the second studio album by American soul singer and songwriter Millie Jackson (born Thomson, Georgia, 1944), and the first in which she exercised meaningful creative control over her own material. It is also the album that marked the beginning of her enduring collaboration with producer Brad Shapiro, who brought her to Muscle Shoals — the Alabama studios where Aretha Franklin, Etta James and Wilson Pickett had recorded some of their finest work — and matched her with a rhythm section and sound far better suited to her powerful, earthy voice than the arrangements on her debut. The album contains some of her most politically engaged lyrics — 'I Cry', 'Hypocrisy' and 'Two-Faced World' carry a social commentary reminiscent of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On — alongside deeply personal material on desire and relationships. The title track and 'Love Doctor' were featured in the 1973 blaxploitation film Cleopatra Jones, which is how the album came to be named as it was; Millie Jackson herself recounted that the album's original title had been something else entirely, and was changed after the film's release. The album was co-produced by Raeford Gerald (who had produced her debut) and Brad Shapiro.
Label: Spring Records (distributed by Polydor Incorporated), 1973.
Producers: Raeford Gerald (side one tracks and select others); Brad Shapiro (the Muscle Shoals sessions, including the title track).
Recording studios: Media Sound Studios, New York City; Muscle Shoals Sound Studios, Muscle Shoals, Alabama, USA.
Critical reception: Robert Christgau gave the album a B+ in Creem, praising the production's mix of influences and the album's 'hint of concept'. Rate Your Music reviewers celebrate it as 'probably one of her more sedate albums' in terms of later notoriety, but as the one that 'showcases her amazingly soulful voice' most purely, comparing the music favourably to the best of Isaac Hayes. It is consistently praised as the album on which Millie Jackson found her own artistic identity.
Commercial success: 'It Hurts So Good', the title track, became Millie Jackson's biggest hit to that point, driven by its exposure in Cleopatra Jones. The album sold well and established Jackson as a significant voice in Southern soul and R&B. Her subsequent album Caught Up (1974) would become her most celebrated work, but It Hurts So Good is widely regarded as the turning point that made it possible.
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