the specific pain of being replaced. Smokey Robinson wrote it as a heartbreaking ballad about a man who hears that his former lover is now with someone new, and the news hits him harder than he expected. Who's lovin' you... the question is not curiosity. It is a wound. Smokey's original is built for his voice, the kind of performance that makes you forget that the Miracles were a group and remember only the lead singer's vulnerability.

That same wound gets a youthful transformation in the Jackson 5's 1969 version. Where Smokey's original is a grown man's adult heartbreak, the Jackson 5 version is delivered by a twelve-year-old who sounds like he has already lived through every heartbreak that exists. Michael's voice on this track is a revelation ... that incredible pre-adolescent instrument carrying adult emotions with such conviction that you forget how old he is. The arrangement is pure Motown, tight and energetic, but the voice is doing something the arrangement cannot contain. Where Smokey sang about being replaced as a man who had been through it before, Michael sings about it as if he is discovering the pain for the first time, and that first-time quality gives the song a different kind of power.