Here Comes the Sun

Recorded at RCA's Studio B in New York in February 1971, Here Comes the Sun was Nina Simone's penultimate studio album for RCA and came at a turbulent, transitional point in her career, shortly before she left the label and the United States for an extended period of self-exile. Rather than original compositions, the record is built almost entirely from contemporary pop, folk and rock covers - songs by George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Paul Anka and others - reimagined through Simone's classically trained piano and her uniquely commanding, dramatic vocal phrasing, framed by Harold Wheeler's lush orchestral arrangements and a backing chorale. Her version of "My Way" recasts the Sinatra standard with an insistent, Africa-tinged rhythmic drive, while her reading of "Here Comes the Sun" and "Just Like a Woman" show her singular gift for inhabiting other writers' songs and making them unmistakably her own. Coming after the more overtly political Black Gold, the album is a quieter, more interior statement from an artist who had already redefined what a singer-pianist steeped in jazz, blues, gospel and classical training could do in American popular music. Critical reception at the time was mixed to favorable, and the record has since been reassessed by collectors and critics as an underrated late-period entry in Simone's catalog, valued for the strength of her interpretive artistry even when the material itself was drawn from elsewhere. It remains an important document of Simone bridging the soul and singer-songwriter idioms of the early 1970s while retaining the emotional intensity that made her one of the era's most singular vocal interpreters.