Of course Diana Ross’s solo career was a success; as great as the Supremes were, her ambition and her talent not only demanded a one-woman spotlight but justified it. Still, it’s fascinating to take her self-titled debut — an early peak that wouldn’t be bettered in her studio-album catalogue for a decade — and listen to it in the context of a still-rising icon put to a make-or-break challenge. Fueled by a fascinating re-inventive slate of Ashford & Simpson’s best ’60s material, and delivered with her superstar charm and accessibly-untouchable emotive performances to go with, Diana Ross (1970) definitely sounds bigger than it charted. That goes for the LP as a whole — a Billboard 200 #19 peak that sounds a lot more like the gold record it’d eventually become, including a Side 2 where the deep cuts cut deep. (Between “Keep an Eye” and “Dark Side of the World,” Ross helmed a couple underheralded classics of romantic anxiety and abandonment, pulled off with amazing sophistication and poise.) And it applies to the big singles, too: her minor-hit / major-performance revamp of the Gaye/Terrell-immortalized “You’re All I Need to Get By” is never going to eclipse the original, but she treats the material with a fascinating blend of reverence for the precedent and self-assured strength in her own still-youthful yet experienced blend of yearning delicacy and desire-driven power. And her “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” is performed with the kind of command that states if I’m going to act like a diva, I’m both obliged and compelled to justify it — a peak of secular gospel as love song and a fantastic terminus of old-school pre-Los Angeles Motown sound, enough to make you ask if there was a peak higher than #1 she could be awarded somehow.

– Nate Patrin