This Will Be

This Will Be — Natalie Cole (1975)

When Natalie Cole arrived at Capitol Records in 1975 with her debut album Inseparable, the music industry was not certain what to make of her. She was the daughter of the legendary Nat King Cole, a fact that brought both enormous expectation and uncomfortable scrutiny. The question of whether she could establish an identity independent of her father's towering legacy followed her into the studio and into the press, and it was a question that This Will Be (An Everlasting Love) answered with such force and immediacy that it silenced the doubters almost before they had finished asking.

The song was written by Chuck Jackson and Marvin Yancy, two Chicago-based songwriters and producers who would become central figures in the early phase of Cole's career. Yancy in particular developed a close creative and personal relationship with Cole; the two would later marry, and their partnership shaped the sound of her first several albums. Jackson and Yancy understood that Cole needed material that would showcase her extraordinary vocal range without inviting direct comparison to her father's smoother, more restrained approach to ballads. The solution was to lean into an uptempo, gospel-inflected soul arrangement that placed her voice in territory Nat King Cole had never occupied.

The production of This Will Be reflected the dominant sound of mid-1970s soul and rhythm and blues at its most commercially polished. The track opened with a horn fanfare that signalled celebration before the vocal had even begun, and the rhythm section drove the arrangement forward with a momentum that gave the song a quality closer to a declaration than a conventional love ballad. Cole attacked the material with an energy that seemed to surprise even the most seasoned listeners; her voice climbed through the song with a confidence that felt entirely earned rather than performed.

The single was released in the summer of 1975 and climbed the Billboard charts with remarkable speed. It reached number 6 on the Billboard Hot 100, an exceptional debut performance, and performed even more strongly on the rhythm and blues chart, peaking at number 1 on the R&B singles chart for a period that confirmed Cole's immediate connection with Black radio audiences who appreciated the song's gospel energy and soul production values. The album Inseparable became a substantial commercial success, and the success of the single was a primary driver of that result.

The critical reception was equally enthusiastic. Reviewers noted that Cole had managed to emerge from one of popular music's most formidable shadows by refusing to compete on her father's terms. She had planted her flag in soul and gospel territory that was unambiguously her own, and the music industry acknowledged that achievement. This Will Be earned Natalie Cole a Grammy Award for Best New Artist and a Grammy Award for Best R&B Vocal Performance, Female, at the 1976 Grammy ceremony, a double recognition that marked one of the most impressive debut seasons in the award's history for a female soul artist.

Capitol Records recognised immediately that it had signed a major talent and invested in promoting the record accordingly. The label's promotional push coincided with a moment in mid-1970s radio when rhythm and blues was crossing over to mainstream pop audiences with increasing regularity, and the song's irresistible energy made it a natural crossover candidate. Radio programmers at both format types embraced it, and the result was a chart performance that demonstrated Cole's appeal was genuinely broad rather than confined to a single demographic.

The song's production also benefited from the Chicago studio culture that Jackson and Yancy brought to the project. The city had developed its own strand of polished soul production through the previous decade, building on the gospel church tradition that remained central to African American musical life in the Midwest, and that heritage was audible in every bar of This Will Be. The choir-like backing vocal arrangements, the authoritative brass section, and the rhythmic drive of the rhythm guitar all pointed to a production aesthetic with deep roots in Chicago's musical community.

In the decades since its initial release, the song has maintained a presence in popular culture through repeated licensing and compilation appearances. It has been featured in numerous film and television productions seeking to evoke the optimism and energy of the mid-1970s, and its presence on holiday-themed compilations became particularly consistent from the 1980s onward. Natalie Cole herself revisited the track in live performances throughout her career, often using it as a closing number precisely because its energy was capable of lifting a concert audience in a way that few songs could match.

The legacy of This Will Be within Cole's catalog is singular. It was not simply her first hit; it was the song that defined the artistic terms on which she would be judged for the next several years, and the standard it set was genuinely formidable. The combination of technical vocal command, genuine emotional investment, and a production arrangement of real sophistication created a debut that continues to be cited by soul music historians as one of the genre's defining moments of the decade.