The first thing you need to know about Minnie Riperton’s album Perfect Angel, released by Epic Records in 1974, is that Stevie Wonder is all over it. He arranged and coproduced the whole thing, wrote two songs, and played various instruments alongside members of his backing band, Wonderlove. Already a significant figure in the soul-pop-rock pantheon but not quite the cultural icon he has since become, Wonder was credited on this record mostly under none-too-subtle pseudonyms, his presence neither trumpeted nor kept secret.
Born in 1950, Wonder had evolved from his early billing as Little Stevie, “The 12-Year-Old Genius”. Through the 1960s, he created irresistible R&B/pop-rock hits, such as “I Was Made to Love Her”, For Once in My Life”, and “My Cherie Amour”. With Music of My Mind (1972), Talking Book (1973), and Innervisions (1974), he propelled his star even higher, becoming a boundary-defying recording artist whose full-length creations would thenceforward be ranked among the greatest achievements in popular music. Later, in 1974, he’d deliver another in this stellar series, Fulfilingness’ First Finale. Two years later, Songs in the Key of Life, a double album plus a four-song EP, felt like a bounty dropped from Olympus. At the time, Wonder’s touch was golden.
Meanwhile, between Innervisions and Fulfilingess’ First Finale, Wonder had the mojo to help 27-year-old Minnie Riperton create her career-defining Perfect Angel. That same year, in addition to coproducing this album with Riperton’s husband and songwriting partner, Richard Rudolph, Wonder produced an album by his ex-wife, the soul singer Syreeta. Riperton sang backup vocals on Stevie Wonder Presents: Syreeta and Fulfilingness’ First Finale, but her own album was the first of the three to be released.
Before Perfect Angel, Riperton had performed in various capacities. She had been a backup singer (for such little-known performers as Chuck Berry, Etta James, Ramsey Lewis, and Muddy Waters), been a member of the girl group the Gems, and been the lead singer of the soul-funk-pop-rock band Rotary Connection. She released one single under the pseudonym Andrea Davis and one solo album under her own name, 1970’s Come to My Garden. After Perfect Angel, she released several well-received LPs and enjoyed a high profile until her death from cancer in 1979.
If you paid attention to soul-pop in the 1970s, there was a good chance that you were aware of Minnie Riperton. In 2024, you may not know her name unless you’re a devotee of that music. If you do, it’s probably for one or two reasons. One reason is that Riperton and Richard Rudolph were the parents of the actor and comedian Maya Rudolph, most famous for her time on Saturday Night Live (especially her impersonation of Kamala Harris). The other reason is that Perfect Angel yielded a hit single that, 50 years later, continues to be played and beloved: Riperton and Rudolph’s appropriately named “Lovin’ You”.
If you need your memory jogged—and you want the mental exercise of retrieving this song without searching or hearing a sample—imagine a sweet, high-pitched female voice singing, “Lovin’ you / Is easy ’cause you’re beautiful.” Does that ring a bell? Riperton’s voice swoops, glides, and produces all manner of sound effects as if simulating birdsong. It also indulges in a fair number of “la-la-la-la’s”.
If this music counts as soul, that designation refers to the Blackness of the singer. This doesn’t sound like soul in the generally accepted sense of the genre. The instrumentation on “Lovin’ You” is spare, gentle, more folky than funky. But while the music may cross a porous border into easy listening, the lyrics’ straightforwardly romantic sentiment becomes explicitly sexual through references to “makin’ love with you”, which the singer declares is “all I wanna do”.
Those references were edgy for mellow mainstream soul-pop in 1974, and the cover art reinforced their edginess. The front of Minnie Riperton’s previous album, Come to My Garden, showed her looking gorgeous but bored. She was dressed up in a flowing, shoulderless gown but stranded in a “garden” that might have been a cemetery. Her right hand lurked mysteriously behind her back. Was it holding something? By coincidence or not, that same hand plays a prominent part on the ironic front cover of Perfect Angel. Here, Riperton has traded her gown for cleavage-revealing overalls. Her right hand, no longer hidden, grips a perfectly phallic ice cream cone whose head drips melted vanilla all over her fingers. What the symbolism lacks in subtlety, it makes up for with sexiness and humor.
In other hands, we might view the Perfect Angel cover as exploitative. However, Riperton looks so comfortable, and her expression conveys such a winning combination of amusement and distance that we may assume she fully participated in the image creation. Plus, it’s not as though she’s staring at the cone lasciviously or looking to the side distractedly as on Come to My Garden. She’s holding the cone like a microphone and looking at us with a twinkle in her eye. She knows the shoot will end when the creative team hits the sweet spot. She suspects the result will help get this record its well-deserved attention. She is having fun. She might even like vanilla.
That picture is the only image on the original album, whose back cover is all words, presenting credits and a handwritten endorsement from “a very special fan” (who seems not to have been Stevie Wonder). This note reads, in part, “It’s hard to believe how incredibly high and beautiful Minnie can sing. But I know her, and I believe. Sometimes, I just lay back and try to imagine how sweet her soul must be.”
For a good look at Minnie Riperton bringing her sweet soul and multi-octave range to “Lovin’ You”, watch the YouTube video of the singer and her band delivering this hit on television’s The Midnight Special in 1975. Equally illustrative is her performance on that same show of “Inside My Love”. That single comes from Riperton’s follow-up to Perfect Angel, 1975’s Adventures in Paradise. In this latter clip, as she invites her lover to “come inside me… ride inside me”, Riperton looks imperfectly angelic as she equates romantic, sexual, and spiritual love and as hitting each note transports her.
But if you come to Perfect Angel looking for such hot stuff or, by contrast, expecting mellow variations on “Lovin’ You”, you’ll be surprised. The other eight tracks do different things.
For example, the opener, Riperton and Rudolph’s “Reasons”, offers light funk that capitalizes on the singer’s range and versatility. Their “It’s So Nice (To See Old Friends)”, propelled by strummed acoustic guitar and rippling piano embellishment, has the country-folk-rock atmosphere of the era’s singer-songwriter and classic-rock recordings. Aspiring singers should study Riperton’s vocals here as the definition of commitment and a model of traversing moods and modes. “Every Time He Comes Around”, from its live-in-the-studio drums to its fuzz-toned electric guitar to its tinkling keyboard accents to Riperton’s growl, is as straightforwardly delicious as 1970s soul-pop gets. The album closer, “Our Lives”, is languid and psychedelic, especially at the end, where the band work variations on a rhythm as Riperton hits her patented high notes and Wonder solos on harmonica.
While Perfect Angel should be seen as more Minnie Riperton’s achievement than a footnote to Stevie Wonder’s career, his presence is unmistakable. The arrangement of “Seeing You This Way” copies his 1973 song “Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing” without Spanish inflections. One of his two compositions here, “Take a Little Trip”, features his trademark velvety keyboards and jazzy chord changes. Still, even on this track and Wonder’s title song, Riperton is too much her own person to perform Wonder karaoke. If you have any doubts, listen to the high whistles, which are this singer’s specialty.
She famously used them on “Lovin’ You”, her calling card. If you hadn’t heard that Wonder arranged and produced that one, you wouldn’t have guessed it because he and the musicians gave Riperton the spotlight. Over the decades, that recording has been sampled, covered, used in movies, and included in compilations. For gifting us with it, for her warmth and generosity, vocal prowess, and sheer artistry, Minnie Riperton remains revered by those in the know. Be one of them now.