Composition
"Let's Get It On" features soulful, passionate vocals and multi-tracked background singing, both by Gaye. It has a 1950s-styled melody and begins with three wah-wah guitar notes and centers around simple chord changes, while its arrangements are centered around an eccentric rhythm pattern. Its signature funk guitar playing is by session musician Melvin "Wah-Wah Watson" Ragin. Music journalist Jon Landau dubs the song "a classic Motown single, endlessly repeatable and always enjoyable". The song is reprised on the fourth track, "Keep Gettin' It On". It expands on the title track's sensual theme with political overtones: "won't you rather make love, children / as opposed to war, like you know you should."
"Distant Lover" has Gaye crooning over serene instrumentation, leading to soulful screams near the end; from a heartbroken croon to an impassioned wail. The song's lyrics chronicled the yearning its narrator feels for a lover who is "so many miles away", as he pleads for her return and laments the emptiness he feels without her. Music writer Donarld A. Guarisco later wrote of the song's sound, in that "Marvin Gaye's studio recording enhances the dreamy style of the song with stately horn and strings, tumbling drum fills that gently nudge the song along, and mellow, doo wop-styled background vocals that echo "love her, you love her" under his romantic pleas. The song later became a concert favorite for Gaye and a live concert version, featuring female fans screaming in the background, was released as a single from his Marvin Gaye Live! album in 1974.
"You Sure Love to Ball" is one of Gaye's most sexually overt and controversial singles, with its intro and outro featuring moaning sounds made by a man and woman engaged in sex. The sexual-explicit and risqué nature of the album's content were, at the time, controversial, and the recording of such an album was deemed as a commercial risk by Motown A&R's (Artists and Repertoire) and label executives.
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