WHOT Episode 146 – “I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know” by Donny Hathaway
Hosted by Mangus Khan

[The needle drops. Slow, mournful horns seep in like breath through clenched teeth. A Rhodes electric piano begins to speak.]

“WHOT.

The hottest in the cool.

You’re tuned to Late Night Grooves.

And I’m Mangus Khan.

And tonight…

We surrender.

To what we feel.

To what we can’t fix.

And to the voices that somehow carry all that weight with grace.

Tonight’s sermon?

Donny Hathaway – ‘I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know.’

From Extension of a Man, 1973.

Let me tell you something—this isn’t a song you casually toss on a playlist.

This is the kind of track you crawl into when your love isn’t pretty, but it’s real.

Donny doesn’t sing this—he bleeds it.

“If I ever leave you, you can say I told you so…”

That’s not romance.
That’s reality.

This is a man trying to explain how deep his love goes—not despite the pain, but because of it.

The horns swell like unresolved guilt.

The piano doesn’t dance—it aches.

And Donny?

His voice is velvet dipped in desperation.

Controlled. Composed. But at the edge of cracking.

You don’t sing like this unless you’ve begged at a closed door.

Unless you’ve made promises knowing you might break them, but meant every word anyway.

What makes this track devastating isn’t just the love he’s singing about.

It’s the weight of knowing that no matter what he gives, it still might not be enough.

And he sings it anyway.

That’s the part that wrecks you.

Because sometimes love isn’t clean.

Sometimes it’s a war inside you—a tug-of-war between what you feel and what you fear.

And Donny gives us all of it.

Raw. Luminous. Exhausted.

Extension of a Man is filled with brilliance—arrangements that stretch and breathe, compositions that soar.

But this one?

This is the heart.

The bleeding core.

And you don’t walk away from it the same.

Episode 146.

Donny Hathaway.
I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know.

This is Late Night Grooves.
WHOT.

And I’m Mangus Khan.

Holding space for all of it—
The glory. The grief. The grip.

Stay with me.

The night’s not done yet.”

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