This Will Be (An Everlasting Love)

Natalie Cole's first single, this funky pop song made a statement that she was not going to be a ballad singer like her famous father, Nat King Cole, who died when she was 15. Natalie worked hard to stay out of her father's shadow, and didn't start singing seriously until her senior year at the University of Massachusetts. After graduating in 1972 with a degree in child psychology, she started singing at small venues and met the producers Chuck Jackson and Marvin Yancy in 1974. Jackson and Yancy were in the group The Independents, which had broken up. They recorded Cole at Curtis Mayfield's studio in Chicago, writing and producing all the songs that would get her a record deal with Capitol (also her dad's label) and become the Inseparable album.

There is no magical meaning behind this song - according to Chuck Jackson, he and Yancy wrote it after Larkin Arnold at Capitol said he didn't hear a hit single on the album. Jackson and Yancy went back to their hotel and wrote the song that night, providing Cole's big hit.

This was the first of five consecutive #1 R&B hits for Natalie Cole. She was extremely successful in the late '70s, but also developed a drug addiction that derailed her career and almost killed her. She got sober in the mid-'80s and launched a comeback that peaked with her 1991 album Unforgettable... with Love, where she sang many of her father's hits.