Baby This Love I Have

Recorded in 1975 for Adventures in Paradise, with Minnie Riperton writing and performing the track alongside Richard Rudolph and Leon Ware. Stewart Levine produced the album with Riperton and Rudolph, and the sessions featured Los Angeles studio players such as Joe Sample, Larry Carlton, Jim Gordon, Dorothy Ashby, and Rik Pekkonen on engineering. The opening track on Adventures in Paradise, it helped define the album’s intimate, sophisticated soul-jazz direction. Although not a chart single, it became one of Riperton’s most sampled album cuts and later fed hip-hop and R&B records such as A Tribe Called Quest’s “Check the Rhime” and Soul IV Real’s “Candy Rain.” The song’s bass line and groove have given it lasting afterlife in sample culture, with later uses appearing in rap and R&B records including A Tribe Called Quest, Soul IV Real, and Common. It remains one of the most recognizable deep cuts from Riperton’s Epic-era catalog.