As attested by producer John Florez himself on his YouTube channel, Season For Love was his and Willie's attempt to get promotion from the "white pop" side of RCA after the commercial failure of his absolutely classic first LP, Soul Portrait. The attempt failed, and RCA shuffled this back to their R&B side, where they had zero dollars for payola (and hence, their records almost always failed commercially). What's left is Willie Hutch diving deep into AM radio pop, and maintaining a strong At The Copa-like Sam Cooke influence all over the place. Oddly when considering his funk workouts to come starting in '73, this works in spades, with fantastic string work all over the place as on tracks like "The Twelfth Of Never" and "The Magic Of Love", often with horns washing over strings washing over horns. The title track is a monster as well, but "Trying To Understand a Woman" is absolutely the single that should have put Hutch all over the pop charts, a jaunty (if mildly misogynous in hindsight) sweet soul number with a shuffling, satisfying groove that edges into a frisson of a chorus that closes far too quick at the 2:30 point. This is a "what if" kind of LP, one unlike anything Willie Hutch ever did, that begs the question of what might have been had RCA marketed this to white AM radio. We'll never know, but it doesn't matter - this is Willie Hutch at his most composed, and yet the fierce energy bubbling under on Season For Love can't be denied.
