Marvin Gaye | Midnight Love | singer | Brussels | America

"Cousaert wasn't sure he wanted me to hang out with Marvin," Ritz says. "He was very suspicious and very protective and very proprietary. But when I started talking to Marvin, I got the idea Cousaert had been really good for him. The vibe I got from Marvin was, 'How can I get back? I am coming back.' That was quiet determination. He loved Ostend. The air was clean. It was pretty much long walks, jogs, bike rides - sort of a restoration, restoring his spirit."

At one point in their marathon talks, which provided much of the material for Ritz's biography of Gaye, Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye, Ritz told Gaye that the singer needed "sexual healing." The phrase caught Gaye's imagination.

"What he responded to was the notion of healing," Ritz says. "He asked me what I meant, and I said, 'You need a woman who loves you as you.' I told him we all need healing. We all need the introduction of love. In the creation of the song, which took only minutes, he asked me to write a poem, and he wrote the music. It all fell together effortlessly. I think the song went with the desire of his heart that he be restored, not just to the charts of popular music, but also restored to a country that he had rejected, and that he felt had rejected him, and restored to the bosom of his nuclear family, from whom he had withdrawn."

THE SONG GAYE AND RITZ wrote together provided the centerpiece for 1982's Midnight Love, the comeback album Gaye recorded in a small studio outside of Brussels with musicians imported from America. He turned to his original musical mentor, Harvey Fuqua (from one of Gaye's first doo-wop groups, the Moonglows), to help produce what would be one of his most vital albums.