Marilyn McLeod is best known, if she is known at all, as the songwriter behind hit singles for Diana Ross and Junior Walker.

She’s also the sister of Alic Coltrane, the half-sister of jazz bassist Ernie Farrow, and the grandmother of Steven Ellison, aka Flying Lotus.

Less well known is that Marilyn also made records of her own, and this hi-NRG disco number is one of them. 

By the time it came out in 1979 she was already a successful songwrite at Motown, her talent having been spotted after Berry Gordy gave her a job at the label’s Detroit office.

Starting out as a keypunch operator, her more creative talents were soon discovered, and in 1972 she co-wrote the beautiful Walk In The Night (with Johnny Bristol) for Junior Walker & The All Stars.

Working with different co-writers, she composed two songs for a duets album between Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye, and penned the latter’s solo song The World Is Rated X.

When Motown moved from Detroit to Los Angeles, Marilyn moved with them and began writing with English lyricist Pam Sawyer, composing Love Hangover for Diana Ross – a Top Ten hit in 1976 – and the following year’s High Inergy hit You Can’t Turn Me Off (In The Middle Of Turning Me On).

McLeod left Motown in 1985 and in the early 1990s she co-wrote several songs for Northern Soul DJ Ian Levine and his Motown revival label Motorcity Records, going on to release her own album, I Believe In Me, in 2010.

She suffered a stroke the following year, which left her partly paralysed, and in 2020 a musical tribute for her featured luminaries like Lamont Dozier, Michelle Coltrane and Freda Payne.
She died in 2021 at the age of 82.