The Heardle puzzle for Sunday, June 5 took listeners back nearly half a century to one of the most iconic songs of its era. Fair warning: the Heardle answer is spoiled in the article below!
Heardle challenges listeners to guess what song they’re hearing based on as little as one second of playtime, following a similar format to the breakout hit game Wordle. On Sunday, listeners got six chances to guess that they were hearing “Sexual Healing” by Marvin Gaye. Naturally, this is one of the puzzles that is skewed towards a specific generation and demographic, proving how few aficionados out there really know the totality of pop music as well as they think they do. If you missed this one, there’s no shame, whereas if you guessed it, it probably felt like one of the most obvious clues yet.
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“Sexual Healing” was the first single on Gaye’s album Midnight Love, released in 1982. Not only that – it was Gaye’s first single after fulfilling his contract with Motown Records and leaving the label behind. Midnight Love was released by Columbia and CBS Records. “Sexual Healing” credits Gaye, Odell Brown and David Ritz as songwriters.
Fans would not necessarily have known this at the time, but “Sexual Healing” came at a difficult, pivotal time in Gaye’s life. According to Ritz’s biography of Gaye, Divided Soul, the singer felt creatively betrayed by Motown. He believed that his previous record was not complete. He was also recovering from cocaine addiction and depression, and he went to great lengths to escape his vices – moving to Ostend, Belgium at the end of his European tour.
The song has been heavily analyzed from just about every angle, with some listeners inevitably treating it as superficial and others reading deep, poetic implications into its composition. Either way, there’s no denying the song’s success and widespread influence. It was a huge commercial hit in its time and has even had some spikes in interest in the era of streaming as well.
This is the kind of walk down memory lane that keeps bringing fans back to Heardle day after day. The game plays a second or two of music at a time, giving listeners six chances to guess what song they are hearing. If they guess wrong or skip a round, they get another clue. You can find the game here if you’re interested in trying it for yourself.
