01 The Story

Jermaine Jackson — "That's How Love Goes" (1972): A Solo Debut from Inside the Family Circle

In the autumn of 1972, Jermaine Jackson was simultaneously one of the most famous teenagers in America and one of the most professionally constrained. As a member of the Jackson 5, he had co-starred in one of the most spectacular commercial phenomena in the history of popular music: the group's first four consecutive singles had all reached number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 between 1970 and 1971. But the Jackson 5's collective trajectory was managed tightly by Motown Records' executive apparatus, and the question of when and how individual members would be permitted to develop parallel solo careers was a point of ongoing negotiation between the Jacksons and the label.

"That's How Love Goes" was Jermaine Jackson's debut solo single, released on Motown Records in the summer of 1972 while he was still an active member of the Jackson 5. The song was produced within the Motown system, utilizing the label's in-house production infrastructure and the considerable resources that the company devoted to developing young artists on its roster. The production sound was squarely within the early 1970s Motown pop-soul tradition: warm horns, precise rhythm section work, and an arrangement designed to showcase a young male vocalist's range and emotional expressiveness.

At the time of the single's release, Jermaine was 17 years old and had been a professional performer since he was very young, having joined the Jackson family group as a young child in Gary, Indiana. His voice had developed the smooth baritone quality that would define his adult recordings, and the production team behind "That's How Love Goes" was clearly working to position him as a solo romantic crooner in the tradition of Motown's established male vocalists. The song itself was a mid-tempo love declaration with an orchestral foundation and melodic hooks designed to appeal to the same young female audience that had made the Jackson 5 a phenomenon.

The single entered the Billboard Hot 100 on September 16, 1972, debuting at number 83. Its chart movement over the following weeks was steady and encouraging: it climbed to 73, then 64, then 56 over four weeks of consistent radio support. The song reached its peak of number 46 on the Hot 100 during the week of November 11, 1972, spending 11 weeks on the chart in total. On the Billboard R&B chart, the single performed considerably better, reaching the top 10 and demonstrating that Jermaine's core audience was the same Black radio listenership that had driven the Jackson 5's success.

The commercial performance of "That's How Love Goes" was respectable for a debut solo single from a young artist whose primary identity was as a group member. Motown's promotional apparatus was not fully deployed on behalf of solo Jackson 5 members at this stage; the label's priority was maintaining the group's commercial momentum. Nevertheless, the single's chart performance indicated that Jermaine had genuine solo commercial potential, a fact that Motown would continue to develop over the following years.

Jermaine's solo career at Motown would continue through the mid-1970s, producing the number-1 pop hit "Let's Get Serious" in 1980 and a string of R&B chart entries. His decision to remain at Motown when the other Jackson brothers moved to Epic Records in 1975 created a significant personal and professional rift, and "That's How Love Goes" represents the hopeful beginning of a solo trajectory that would take complex turns before arriving at its eventual destination. The 1972 single stands as a document of young ambition and professional promise, shaped by the Motown system that produced it.

The context of the broader Jackson family's dominance of early 1970s pop radio makes "That's How Love Goes" particularly interesting as a historical artifact. Motown's willingness to launch a solo career for Jermaine while the Jackson 5 was still at the height of its commercial power reflected both the label's confidence in the family's collective appeal and its strategic interest in developing multiple revenue streams from a single talent source.

02 Song Meaning

Young Love's Certainty: The Emotional Logic of "That's How Love Goes"

"That's How Love Goes" is a song of youthful romantic assertion, a declaration made with the confidence that comes from feeling something powerfully before experience has had the chance to complicate it. Jermaine Jackson's delivery at 17 captures a particular emotional register that is rare in popular song: the absolute sincerity of someone for whom romantic feeling is still new enough to be overwhelming rather than familiar enough to be ambivalent. The song presents love not as a complex negotiation or a source of anxiety but as a fact, something that simply is, and that requires acknowledgment rather than analysis.

The title's grammatical construction is worth examining. "That's how love goes" is a declarative sentence, a statement of observed fact rather than a wish or a question. It implies that the speaker has figured something out, reached a conclusion about the nature of romantic feeling through direct experience. At 17, that conclusion is probably premature, but the song is not really interested in epistemological accuracy. It is interested in the phenomenology of the feeling itself, the sense of certainty that love produces in its early stages regardless of what subsequent experience might reveal.

The Motown production aesthetic that frames Jackson's vocal matches the emotional tone of the lyric perfectly. The orchestral warmth of the arrangement, the precise rhythm section, the background vocal sweetening: all of these elements suggest a world in which romantic feeling is self-evidently significant, worth the full resources of musical craft. There is nothing tentative about the production choices, and that confidence on the sonic level mirrors the emotional confidence of the lyrical content. Love is being treated as a serious subject, and the music insists on that seriousness through its own elaborateness.

The song also participates in a specific tradition of Motown's approach to young male performers. The label had developed, over the course of the 1960s, a particular way of presenting young Black men as romantic subjects: sincere, gentlemanly, devoted, and non-threatening in the ways that would make them accessible to the broadest possible audience. Jackson's performance of "That's How Love Goes" fits within this tradition while also beginning to sketch the outline of a more individuated artistic identity. The specificity of his vocal timbre is already present in this debut recording, distinguishing his voice from the Jackson 5's collective sound.

The emotional world of the song is essentially optimistic. Love, in this telling, is something that happens to good people and produces good outcomes. The complications and disappointments that more mature romantic songwriting tends to foreground are largely absent. This is not naivety exactly, but rather the genuine optimism of a young person who has not yet accumulated enough experience to know that love is also capable of producing its opposite. That quality, specific to a particular moment in a young life, is preserved in the recording with unusual clarity.