Songfacts®:

• "The Agony and the Ecstasy" is a heartsick soul ballad from Smokey Robinson's A Quiet Storm album. The song tells the story of a secret affair, where rapture and regret arrive as an inseparable set.
• In his 1989 autobiography Inside My Life, Robinson admitted that in the mid-1970s, while married to Claudette, he was entangled in an affair with a dancer from the Soul Train TV show known only as "Mita." Smokey wrote: "She was there nearly every night when I recorded A Quiet Storm. She inspired me. I couldn't let go of her. She was the quiet storm I felt blowing through my life."
• Musically, "The Agony and the Ecstasy" exemplifies the "quiet storm" style Smokey Robinson pioneered. Imagine soul music wrapped in satin sheets, smooth, sophisticated, and emotionally complex. Instead of the exuberant teenage energy of his Miracles days, here was Robinson writing for adults who were negotiating mortgages, divorces and temptations.
• The title came from Irving Stone's 1961 biographical novel about Michelangelo, The Agony and the Ecstasy, later made into a 1965 film with Charlton Heston scowling heroically at blocks of marble. Robinson borrowed it not because he fancied himself a Renaissance sculptor, but because the phrase perfectly captured his theme: the way joy and guilt, desire and anguish, often insist on sharing the same bed.