Love Is Here And Now You're Gone - Juke Box Single

Written and produced by the Motown team of Eddie Holland, Lamont Dozier and Brian Holland (Holland-Dozier-Holland), this is another Supremes songs with lots of dynamic tension between the music and lyric. Diana Ross, the lead singer and focal point of the group, sings about a man who seduced her into falling in love with him, but as soon as she did, he split, leaving her with just his empty promises. The music is much more cheerful though, which was by design. "We had this kind of soft, personal feeling of chords and melody going underneath the artist singing that gave us a nice feeling," Dozier said in a Songfacts interview. "Torchy but not torchy, fun but not over-produced."

Diana Ross does three spoken interludes in this song, delivering dire statements like "You gave me faith, then took my hope." These were Eddie Holland's idea; he noticed that Ross would get very emotional when she sang, and thought she could pull off a dramatic reading - they called it "talk singing." It's something Ross did later on her solo hit "Ain't No Mountain High Enough." With this talent for emoting her materical, it was no surprise when her acting career took off.

This was the first Supremes song that wasn't recorded in Motown's Hitsville USA studios in Detroit. By 1966, the label had signed artists on the West Coast, so Berry Gordy sent the Holland-Dozier-Holland to Los Angeles to investigate studios there. "Love Is Here and Now You're Gone" was the first song the trio attempted in this new environment, using the stalwart session musicians who backed The Monkees, The Mamas & the Papas and many other California hitmakers. When the song took off, it proved that Motown could succeed outside of its own studios and without their house band, The Funk Brothers. The next Supremes single, "The Happening," was also recorded there and went to #1.