Earth, Wind & Fire ~ Can't Hide Love 1975 Jazz Funk Purrfection Version

While Earth, Wind and Fire were working on "Gratitude", they were invited to write the soundtrack for a new movie entitled "That's the Way Of the World" at the request of the director Sig Shore. His idea was to blow the lid off the music business after the story about 70's payola hit the newspapers.

Shore then asked the band to play "The Group" in the movie, a rising R&B group that record executive Harvey Keitel wanted to promote instead of "the candy assed family bubblegum act his label was forcing him to work with". (Wonder who that could be?) "Shining Star" became a #1 pop and R&B hit, along with "That's The Way Of The World" and "Reasons", "Yearnin' Learnin'" and "Africano" for the soundtrack and were also included on "Gratitude".

Maurice White sang lead and played drums and kalimba, Philip Bailey also sang lead and played congas and percussion, bass was handled by Verdine White, Al McKay guitar, Larry Dunn on keyboards, Johnny Graham on drums and Andrew Woolfolk on saxophone, flute and percussion. This line up was responsible for breaking the band with "Gratitude".

The album was composed mostly of live versions of those songs with a few new studio recorded songs. It was a crossover success, spending six weeks at #1 on the Billboard Top Soul Albums, and three weeks at #1 on the Billboard Top 200 album chart. The title track "Gratitude" won a Rock Music Award for the Best Soul Album and was nominated for "Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals".

"Can't Hide Love" was a cover of an original song from R&B group Creative Source that was first released in 1973. Writer Skip Scarborough brought the song to Maurice who decided to add the song to their repertoire. Released as an EWF single, it peaked at #11 on the soul chart and #39 on the Hot100, and was nominated for a Grammy in the category of Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s).

Since then the song has been covered by Nancy Wilson and about a dozen other artists, even Prince! He performed the song live in concert in 2008. It has also been sampled by Drake in 2009 on "Beautiful Life" and then Rick Ross on the song "Capone Suite" from the soundtrack of the 2018 remake of "Superfly".