1971 · Album
Here Comes the Sun
Recorded 1971 · RCA Records · Produced by Not specified in verified sources
Nina Simone Covers the Sixties, Her Way
Simone brought her classical training and political fire to songs written for pop radio, making them hers.
By 1971, Nina Simone had spent years mining American songbooks for material that spoke to her—spirituals, standards, protest songs. Here Comes the Sun found her turning to contemporary pop and rock writers: Beatles, Carole King, Harry Nilsson, James Taylor. The title track, George Harrison's "Here Comes the Sun," sits at the center of an album that feels less like a departure and more like Simone following her own logic into new territory. She had always been a cover artist first, a chooser of songs that matched her voice and her convictions. By this point in her career, the line between "standard" and "contemporary" was just repertoire to her.
The records Simone made for RCA in this period showed her working with commercial arrangements and studio orchestration—a far cry from her earlier trio work or the sparse, raw recordings of the mid-1960s. That context matters here. Some listeners found the production glossy; others heard it as Simone claiming resources she had earned. The album landed with middling reception—solid enough, but not celebrated as one of her essential statements. It remains the kind of record long-term fans circle back to, not the entry point, and certainly not the place to begin if you want to understand what made Simone singular.
Yet there is real value in hearing her apply her gifts—her harmonic intelligence, her contralto authority, her refusal to sweeten or smooth—to material written by younger songwriters. She was not trying to compete with the originals or prove anything. She was simply reading the room of contemporary music and deciding what belonged in her voice.
