Stevie Wonder A Time to Love (2005)

From pitchfork.com

For an artist who had spent each decade of his life in the public eye, the years leading up to Stevie Wonder’s 77-minute opus, A Time to Love, were uncharacteristically fallow. Steeped in intrigue and plagued by delays, the album’s decade-long development became a story in itself. Though Wonder had long led the way in studio innovation, it appeared the infinite possibilities of the digital age, combined with his notorious tendency for tinkering, had finally begun to overwhelm him. Twice, hard deadlines came and went. Deep tensions formed between Wonder and his longtime label, Motown, who was pouring resources into the recording and counting on the results to help buttress its flagging bottom line.

Sylvia Rhone, Motown’s newly appointed president, was eager to put the label on a more modern footing, and her simmering frustrations with Wonder soon became public. “In time, God will give me what I need to do the album on time,” he told the press, a fairly open-ended, mystical formulation unlikely to comfort stakeholders. Meanwhile, the credits stretched to include everyone from Prince to Paul McCartney, India.Arie to gospel singer Kim Burrell, and even his own daughter Aisha Morris. Wonder had long enjoyed the company and energy of bountiful collaboration, and all these choices made sense with respect to conjuring a career-spanning aesthetic throughline, but the inevitable scheduling conflicts only further complicated the process.

Process was only part of the distraction. When Wonder’s previous LP, Conversation Peace, was released in 1995, he had graduated from a celebrated musician to something on the order of a cultural deity. As boomers came of age and consolidated political and economic power, the music of their youth was increasingly detached from its context and recycled as nostalgic comfort food: Picture Bill and Hillary Clinton capering to “Don’t Stop” at the 1993 inauguration party, or the historical white-wash of 1994’s Forrest Gump. Try as he might, Wonder struggled like many of his peers to unyoke himself from the cultural forces determined to reduce the radical achievements of the ’60s and ’70s to a passive, self-gratifying soundtrack.

In spite of the crass cheapening of the ’60s tumult, Wonder continued to throw his shoulder into righteous activism. His involvement in the USA for Africa project and the campaign to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday during the 1980s affected lasting and meaningful change. As other avatars of dissent from the previous era lost interest or principle, Wonder’s steadfastness elevated his reputation ever higher. He traveled the world and was greeted like a foreign dignitary. He was feted with awards and performed at the 1999 Super Bowl. Ten fraught days after 9/11, he played harmonica on “America the Beautiful” during what was essentially a nationally televised wake, accompanying Willie Nelson, one of his only true peers as a chronicler of the overlooked and underserved.

Additional complications abounded in Wonder’s personal life, long a Gordian knot of shifting romantic allegiances that eventually resulted in his fathering nine children with five women with whom he was on variously good terms. There were palimony cases and sundry disputes, and the threat of a tell-all book from a former backup singer that mercifully never appeared. Most painful of all was the 2004 death of his first wife and longtime creative partner, Syreeta Wright, which shattered him to his core and inspired the lyrics to the A Time to Love track “Shelter in the Rain.” (“When all the odds say there’s no chance/Amidst the final dance/I’ll be your comfort through your pain.”) This rich tapestry of backstory was widely reported in the music press, fomenting genuine curiosity about what bounty A Time to Love’s seemingly endless gestation period would ultimately produce.

When the first single finally materialized in the spring of 2005, it seemed like all the waiting had been worth it. “So What the Fuss,” featuring Prince on guitar and En Vogue on backing vocals, is a forceful piece of socially conscious funk, with Wonder’s growling vocals and distorted clavinet convincingly conjuring the mood of early ’70s classics Innervisions and Talking Book. Sounding like the ecstatically fried grooves of Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain experiencing the aftershocks of Prince’s own “Housequake,” “So What the Fuss” simmers with a mix of gospel uplift and lurking menace, always the secret undercurrent of Wonder’s best work. Without an official release date for the proper album, Wonder seemed to relish the rough-and-ready vibe, even vetoing Motown’s first choice for a single, the rather mawkish “From the Bottom of My Heart.”

While Motown’s choice for a single wouldn’t have elicited the same excitement, it would have been a more accurate representation of the work to come. When the album was finally released that fall, it was 77 minutes of unerringly stately, sometimes bracing, and occasionally indistinguishable forays into neo-soul and quiet storm, taking love in all its permutations as an overarching theme. After a lost decade, A Time to Love was abundant proof that Stevie Wonder had endured. And yet, it desperately could have used some editing—it’s at least 20 minutes too long. Or perhaps it should have been two very good Stevie Wonder records, rather than one overstuffed omnibus. But genius works in mysterious and sometimes convoluted ways, and these comforting, contented odes to lasting love feel like an act of generosity and an exercise in unvarnished sentiment.

After the long wait, the delays, and the intense build-up, Wonder’s return was neither late-career miracle nor shell-of-his-former-self parody. Instead, it was an earnest overview of the artist in middle age. Opening track “If Your Love Cannot Be Moved,” a salsa-inflected duet with Kim Burrell, spans six leisurely minutes. Its supple groove and genre fusion seem intentionally designed to reassure listeners that Stevie Wonder, the peerless bandleader and arranger, remained very much in control of his gifts. If anything he may be too much in control. “Sweetest Somebody I Know” is a charming grab bag of go-to-Wonder-isms from the Hallmark-adjacent sentiment to the harmonica solo: It’s lovely to listen to, if light on inspiration. So it goes for much of A Time to Love’s slow-burning first half. “Moon Blue” is pretty but a touch perfunctory to justify its near seven minutes. The title of “From the Bottom of My Heart” pulls its refrain from his ’80s smash “I Just Called to Say I Love You” but fails to improve upon it. It isn’t remotely fair, but is nevertheless inevitably the case with an artist of Wonder’s stature: In his fifth decade of recording, his primary competition was his younger self.

If A Time to Love never quite blows you away, there are still glimpses of Wonder’s sublime ability. The gorgeous duet with daughter Aisha Morris, “How Will I Know,” harkens back to his grounding in the jazz standards of the pre-rock era, conjuring the heartbroken balladry of Billy Strayhorn. “My Love Is on Fire” features a buoyant keyboard hook and robust libido à la the ecstatic horndog loverman jams of 1972’s titanic Music of My Mind. The penultimate track, “Positivity,” is a vaguely silly but ultimately irresistible paean to the profound optimism which has been a lifetime trademark of an artist born into the twin adversities of blindness and poverty. Conjuring a winsome vibe liberally borrowed from the Ohio Players’ “Love Rollercoaster,” Wonder continues asking the big questions: “When the people ask me as an African American/What do I see tomorrow in the human plan/Is it possible for all of the people of the world to co-exist?” His answer is hedging, circumspect, but ultimately hopeful.

At its best, A Time to Love uses its self-referential sprawl to convey the wisdom of a man who’d seen it all. He was no longer the prodigy who helped make Motown an institution, or the visionary shaman of ’70s soul, or the go-to hitmaker of the go-go ’80s. The world keeps on turning, and Wonder changes with it. This music was also an endpoint, at least for the time being. Following the record, Wonder essentially went dormant again. Suffering from health problems that required a kidney transplant, he released no new music for 15 years. Then, in 2020, he surfaced with two singles, released on his own label. Even if the unimpeachable masterpieces are behind him, A Time to Love proved his presence can still elevate us to higher ground. If Stevie Wonder hasn’t given up, then why should we?

Stevie Wonder Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants (1979)

From pitchfork.com

A journalist might have found themselves one autumn morning in 1976 eating a luxurious breakfast at Essex House before boarding a private jet to a farmhouse in Worcester, Massachusetts, to have a first-listen to Stevie Wonder’s masterpiece, Songs in the Key of Life. Wonder himself introduced the album, decked out in a cream-colored cowboy suit and hat, with a leather gun belt whose holsters were festooned with the cover art and the message “#1 WITH A BULLET.” Universally beloved, it shipped gold, entered the charts at No. 1, and stayed there until January of 1977.

When a journalist could next chat with Wonder, it was nearly three years later. They could just take the 2 train uptown to the New York Botanical Garden, where critics were instead served vegetarian fare as they listened to another double album, the follow-up to his magnum opus. Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants was years in the making, a soundtrack based on Walon Green’s documentary based on the bestselling book about how plants can be lie-detector tests, how the fern in your house reacts to your emotions, and how mustard seeds can communicate with distant galaxies.

October 1979 was a particularly auspicious month for double albums like Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk and the Who’s Quadrophenia soundtrack (Pink Floyd’s The Wall and the Clash’s London Calling would soon follow). Secret Life of Plants entered at No. 4 on the album charts its first week but quickly plummeted. After Wonder collected 12 Grammys in a four-year span, Secret Life of Plants only garnered one measly nomination. An incredibly ambitious tour—boasting over 60 musicians, singers, sound crew, staff, a computer to synchronize his synthesizers, a screen projecting scenes from the film, and a recording truck—hemorrheged money and was truncated to six dates. Stevie couldn’t even sell out his hometown of Detroit.

Motown Record executives and fans alike did not know where to begin this Journey and critics were merciless. “May Be His Worst Yet,” read one headline. “More than being awful pieces of music, [they] reek of automation and transmit no sincerity,” went a review. Rolling Stone likened it to Karo syrup and called it “a strange succession of stunted songs, nattering ballads and wandering instrumentals,” while Robert Christgau equated it to “[an] anonymous Hollywood hack at their worst…ardently schmaltzy instead of depressingly schlocky.” The Village Voice equated it to “the painful awkwardness of a barely literate sidewalk sermon.”

It’s a reversal of fortune without equal in pop music. In nearly any appreciation of Stevie Wonder’s profound run of music, Secret Life of Plants serves as a page break, a bookend, the arid valley after the vertiginous peak of the beloved Songs in the Key of Life. In almost every assessment, it marks the end of the greatest run in pop music history. “If Alexander wept when there were no more worlds left to conquer,” critic Jack Hamilton said when Slate ran their “Wonder Week” feature, “Stevie happily composed 90 minutes of largely instrumental music for the soundtrack to a documentary about botany.”

Favoring slowness as well as quicksilver mood shifts, spare balladry and additive composition, acoustic guitars and two $40,000 Yamaha GX-1 synthesizers, whimsical experimentation and near invisible incremental movement, an album with six credits for “special programming of synthesizer” and Wonder with almost all other instrumentation, it’s a flummoxing and charming album wherein Wonder sings about seeds, leaves, and ecology as he himself embodies the traits of his botanical muse. The best insight into Plants may lie in the original Times review, where, in the midst of meditating on self-indulgence and Wonder’s sentimental mysticism, John Rockwell notes: “He has also managed to make an album that in its own idiosyncratic way may seem an oasis of peace and calm amid the bustle of the rest of the pop-music business.”

When Wonder accepted the challenge of providing a soundtrack for the documentary, even he was surprised: “I’d always figured if I did one it would be for a film that raised society’s consciousness about black people.” Originally, the film was to use a soundtrack made in part from plants with Wonder contributing “Tree” for the end of the picture. It didn’t fit with the rest of the film, but producer Michael Braun asked Wonder to instead score the entire film. So Wonder would go in with a four-track recorder and headphones. In the left channel was Braun explaining what was happening on-screen while engineer Gary Olazbal would count down the number of frames in the sequence in his right, leaving Wonder to sketch out the score.

Six studios would ultimately be used. It was only the second album to ever be recorded digitally (Ry Cooder’s Bop Til You Drop beat it by a few months) and the first album to use a sampler in the form of the rudimentary Computer Music Melodian, which perhaps explains the special thanks given to the air traffic controllers at Dallas-Fort Worth airport and the Los Angeles Zoo.

Its scope is difficult to convey, not just because a blind musician provided a soundtrack for a film that he himself could not see. Wonder probably saw about as much of the film as the general populace did, as The Secret Life of Plants never got a wide release in theatres and was never put out on VHS, DVD, or made available on streaming services. The opening movement of “Earth’s Creation” is ludicrously bombastic all on its own, full of Phantom of the Opera-style high-frequency shredding and chord-bludgeoning. With the film though, it pairs perfectly with intensely dramatic images of spuming lava, crashing tsunami waves, flapping seaweed, and dancing plankton. The first side of the album remains wildly uneven, but how else to convey the Godlike act of creation without being by turns chaotic, messy, lovely, whimsical, and a little cruel?

“The First Garden”—with its lullaby chimes, sampled bird songs and crickets, acoustic bass, and harmonica line (all played by Wonder)—provides the underlying motif of The Secret Life of Plants and it works magically with the time-lapse images of sprouting acorns, spores, and new shoots. And while “Voyage to India” might seem wilfully exotic on the album, mixing together themes that appear later into an array of wineglass drones, symphonic strings, and sitar, it works with the film and its introduction of Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, the Indian polymath and botanist. Later on, Wonder folds in a Japanese children’s choir and a crackling duo of African kora and djembe drum.

It’s nearly 15 minutes into the album before Stevie Wonder’s voice appears, telling the story of both Bose and George Washington Carver on the plaintive “Same Old Story.” It scans as the first of many songs overtly about plants, as well as one of Wonder’s most forced biographical efforts. But the stories of Bose and Carver are far more painful than that. Bose was an Indian subject of the Queen, his work discovering the electrical nature of plants largely ignored by the Royal Society in London during his time. Across the ocean, the slave-born botanist Carver struggled most of his life to rise to the descriptor of “Black Leonardo.” But as brown- and black-skinned men—“Born of slaves who died,” as Wonder puts it—their genius was discounted and dismissed outright in white society. There’s a tactile resignation in the chorus: “It’s that same old story again.”

In exploring the neglected, ignored, seemingly inhuman aspects that society affixes to the plant kingdom, Wonder finds resonance between his botanical subject matter and the black experience. “A Seed’s a Star” states in its first line: “We’re a people black as is your night/Born to spread Amma’s eternal light.” Reaching back to the Dogon tribe of Africa and their worship of the distant star Sirius B, also referred to as “Po Tolo,” that name in their language signifies at once the immensity of that heavenly body as well as the smallest seed, a paradox that encompasses the interconnectedness of all life.

Stevie introduces many voices other than his own. Children’s voices and overheard conversations hover at the periphery of several songs. Wonder deepens the dimensions of the album with these intimate, everyday sounds, drawing correlations to childhood, memories, and the connections between people, not just between plants. It suggests that the album could seemingly arise out of anyone’s daily life. While the book and film could be esoteric, Wonder insisted that the album was in part about down-to-earth black life and love, telling The Washington Post that year that this music “comes just from my life.” Perhaps that’s why he had his ex-wife, Syreeta Wright, come to lend her soft vocals to the indelible piano ballad, “Come Back as a Flower,” wishing to spread the sweetness of love and envisioning “that with everything I was one.”

Human as it can be, The Secret Life of Plants is big and wide enough to be decidedly other, too, as when Wonder warps his platinum voice with a wide array of electronics. There’s the Brainfeeder funk of “Venus’ Flytrap and The Bug,” maybe the closest he ever got to the sound of his contemporary, George Clinton. And then there’s the femme falsetto he adopts to sing as Pan for one of Journey’s sweet delights, “Power Flower.” A woozy, low-key gem in the Stevie Wonder songbook (check the stretched taffy of his coos-and-drums solo 3:30 into the song) and one of Janet Jackson’s favourites, Wonder utilizes his synths to make himself sound something other than human.

That strange, neutered, warbling, alien voice that arises on the astonishing “Race Babbling” is as visionary a sound as anything Stevie ever created. It’s a techno odyssey that resembles the likes of Carl Craig and Juan Atkins and the hazy, ethereal feel of Solange’s When I Get Home (she explicitly credited this album’s influence on her own approach). In the context of the film’s collage of sped-up urban scenes, it even anticipates Philip Glass’ groundbraking score for another nature documentary, Koyaanisqatsi. Unfurling, clenching, spiralling, and mutating across its nine minutes, it’s the longest song on the album and approaches the sort of gender destabilization of something like the Knife’s Shaking the Habitual. Wonder’s voice morphs and merges with the timbres of trumpet and saxophone (his manically high-pitched vocal hook is a freakish delight), and later blurs into the harmonies of Josie James until it’s hard to parse who is who. It’s a disorienting effect in more ways than one, a queering of the biggest African-American male pop star of the era that’s still without precedent.

Rather than attempt to carry on with Key of Life’s trajectory and his own heritage, Stevie had the rare cache to wander down every path, in effect making Motown his own private press label. No longer rooted to the traditions of soul, gospel or the sound of Motown that he built his legacy upon, Wonder literally branched out, reaching upward towards an undetermined new destination, exploring intuitively and fearlessly in a manner that few artists have ever managed to do in the history of pop music.

Stevie Wonder Hotter Than July (1980)

From pitchfork.com

Today on Pitchfork, we are celebrating the artistic bounty of Stevie Wonder with five new album reviews that span the breadth of his remarkable career.

I find that summer—particularly summer vacation—is what’s truly wasted on the young. Even in the summers where I worked 20 or 30 hours a week at some fast-food spot or convenience store, I still took the relative freedom of the days for granted. I still got to wake up late, stay out later, fuck around for most of my waking hours, and do it all again. Stripped of what I now appreciate as that exhilarating freedom, summer on the other side of adulthood can leave much to be desired. I don’t so much mind the increase in responsibilities, or the earlier alarm, or the more-constant temptation of sleep. But, like so much nostalgic longing, there’s a feeling that I can’t as easily access. Yet I know that even as you read this, you know that feeling, or something like it, even if our definitions of the feeling aren’t the same. It can be unearthed, sometimes, in a scene: a sunset, the taste of a drink, a waning bonfire, and yes, a song. Something to interrupt what otherwise might as well be a long series of hot days that keep getting hotter by the year.

I like the word heat far more than I like the feeling of it. I like the word because I’m from a place where it holds multiple definitions, more than any four letters should. So many that it swells at the seams. In 1980, Stevie Wonder was, perhaps, feeling a few of those definitions hovering over his career, most notably the definition of heat as a type of immovable pressure. What Stevie Wonder accomplished between 1972 and 1977 is astonishing. Baffling to the point of near-impossibility if there weren’t the touchable material to inform a listener that they did not dream it. And with impossible triumph comes impossible expectations. I won’t dwell on 1979’s sprawling Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants here but to say that it is an album that, in quality, nearly matches its overwhelming ambition. But needless to say, after one of the greatest runs of albums there has ever been, Secret Life of Plants fell relatively flat. Motown didn’t promote the record with the same ferocity as Wonder’s previous albums. Secret Life of Plants entered at No. 4 on the album charts, in part due to Wonder’s immense hold on the commercial landscape at the time, but only one of its singles made a mark, and reviews were mixed.

What can’t be undersold about Secret Life of Plants, amid its somewhat forgotten history, is that it was one of the first albums to be digitally recorded, which opened up a new window for Stevie Wonder, always the tinkerer, always seeking the newest and greatest tools to add to his expansive toolbox. Wonder spent 1979 and early 1980 holed up in the studio, toying with new digital recording equipment from Sony, locked in with engineers helping him navigate the technology to best suit his needs. He had purchased an old Hollywood radio studio—the C.P. MacGregor Studio—which was so old that it predated home television, so old it even predated magnetic tape. It had been abandoned for years, but Wonder had an ear for the acoustics of the place, and a feel for its history. Because there was no real recording infrastructure, Wonder had to also purchase a remote recording truck, and have cables run from the truck to the inside of the building. It was, once again, Wonder attempting to find the perfect intersection point between innovation and ambition. Reinventing himself by dragging the past into the future, at any cost.

To speak of heat in the most literal sense, it must be said that it was, indeed, hot in the summer of 1980, in the months right before Stevie Wonder released Hotter Than July, the album that he’d been working on as a career re-shaping step into the new decade. Not hot in the sense of overly romantic summer nostalgia: The 1980 Heat Wave had its most vicious impacts in the Midwest and through the Great Plains. The heatwave began in June and didn’t relent in many areas until September. It was reported to have claimed at least 1,700 lives. There were droughts and agricultural damage. In Kansas City, temperatures were over 100 degrees for 17 days straight. In early August, there was a brief reprieve, only due to a hurricane.

The heatwave made its exit in mid-September, just a week or so before Hotter Than July made its entry. The album’s title—which comes from the opening lyric of the first single, “Master Blaster (Jammin’)”—aligned with the month that the heatwave reached its peak. On the cover of the album, Stevie Wonder is made to look as if he’s survived the heat (that most literal definition, again) that others didn’t. His mouth is half-open somewhere between awe, exhaustion, and pleasure. There is a glint on the edge of his red-rimmed sunglasses which might suggest that he’s turned towards the sun—a suggestion that feels more on-point when one clocks the beads of sweat cascading down his face, towards his neck and bare shoulders. It is an image that gives off a humidity, and the relief that comes with escaping it, even briefly.

There are many ways for a song, or an album, to feel like summer, and Hotter Than July encompasses a small series of examples. Its (highly underappreciated) opening track, “Did I Hear You Say You Love Me,” begins with a slow buildup of voice, a shout that originates from a far-off elsewhere before fighting its way to the front of the sonic line, a slow and steady “…ahhhhHHHHHHHHHHHOUUUUU” and before the music hits, the feeling hits. This is what I mean: There is a buildup and then a release. Confronted with the pleasure and excitement of whatever newfound freedoms (small or large) that summer might offer you, what is there to do but shout something loud and indecipherable to everyone but you. The shout kicks open the door for a slow-trickling groove of guitar and bass interplay and then, through the gaps, come the bursts of horns, steady as sunlight through a cracked curtain of sound. “As If You Read My Mind” is lush, danceable pop, so fluorescent that it might bury the lyrics if not for its infectious chorus that demands to be sung breathlessly, mid-movement. “Do Like You” is a showcase of Wonder’s greatest vocal ability, to bend a single word until it feels like it is unravelling into several words, and to pursue lyrical repetition not for the sake of repetition, but to reach for something greater, more urgent with each rotation of language, so that by the end of the song, when he is fully committed to the circular presentation of the words “show me how to do like you,” there are pauses and ad-libs where you think he might be done before he jumps right back in. The lyrics become first an earnest question, and then one dripping with envy or ferocity, before they circle back to a type of awe.

In these moments, the greatness of Hotter Than July is in how relentlessly Stevie Wonder reaches for the ecstatic—a shift after releasing a high-concept encyclopedia of an album right before this one. At times, Hotter Than July feels like running into a sweltering day; at times it feels like drinking a glass of something cold after coming inside while still smelling like outside; and at times it feels like the slowness that falls over a summer day as it winds down.

For that latter feeling, there is “Master Blaster (Jammin’),” which served as the album’s first single. During Wonder’s creative exploration in the ’70s, he had become friends with Bob Marley, playing live shows with him throughout the latter half of the decade. Reggae had begun to make its way into his sound bank. “Master Blaster” is a slow-swaying ode to Marley, even shouting out the legend in the lyrics. It also uses Marley’s 1977 song “Jamming” as a musical template, taking the sparse guitar and percussion that ran through the original’s backbone and aligning it with Wonder’s expanded imagination, adding layers and pace, but not giving up the song’s feeling of ease. “Master Blaster” signalled a return to Wonder’s status as a hitmaker, staying atop the Billboard R&B charts for seven weeks, and peaking at No. 5 on the pop singles chart.

Hotter Than July is also an album that holds two distinct movements within it. Its final two songs, “Lately” and “Happy Birthday,” work almost as an encore; not entirely separate from the album’s overarching thematic and sonic concerns, but slightly wandering into different territories of emotional purpose and mission, and also robust enough to feel like they are carrying their own weight. The former is a classic Wonder ballad, the artist and piano and a palpable sense of longing (forgettable to me, but only because of Wonder’s singular ability to pull this type of song off in various ways throughout his career).

And then, there is “Happy Birthday.” If you have the record of Hotter Than July, and you unfold all of the gates of the album, that, too, presents an exercise in duality. Directly opposite the cover of Wonder appearing breathless and sweating out the ecstatic pleasures of the sun, there is an image of a piano on fire, in the same color landscape as the cover itself. The two panels on the bottom half are in black and white.

On one side, there is a large portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. against a black background. Above the photo, the date of King’s birth and the date of his death are printed in white lettering. On the opposite side of the sleeve, there are five photos: across the top, a photo of a city divided by a six-lane highway, both sides of that highway encased in smoke, touched by the aftermath of a riot. Across the bottom, a photo of white police officers with white helmets and weapons at the ready, appearing to advance on Black protesters standing in nonviolent defiance. In a photo to the left, there is a Black boy being pulled by the limbs. Two police officers on each arm, and one on his leg. In a photo to the right, a Black man is in a pool of his own blood outside of a store. Another Black man is crouched against the wall, looking away in agony. In the foreground, a police officer in a white helmet stands with a hand on his hip.

The photo in the center is of Martin Luther King Jr., leading a march. The link between the center photo and the surrounding photos is vital, particularly within the American imagination that has limited King to palatable quotes and vague concepts around unity. This photo, surrounded by the other photos, gives context to the engine that pushed King towards his work, and gives context to a society that wanted him gone then, and would still want him gone now. While I have gratitude for the words of King, I have little interest in a framing of him that relies solely on those words—which have, by now, been manipulated and defanged in too many ways, by too many bad-faith actors and institutions. Instead, I desire this kind of presentation: one that shows him in solidarity with other Black people, at the center of America’s chorus of chaos, and Black people’s fight to both survive within it, and tear it apart.

Accompanying this layout is a small message from Wonder, urging the public to join him in pushing for the national recognition of King’s birthday. To those efforts, the song “Happy Birthday” arrives as the landing point for Hotter Than July. In a run of tunes already overflowing with exuberance, it is the album’s longest and most exuberant track. To first note that I don’t necessarily believe that “corny” is a pejorative, one great miracle of “Happy Birthday” is that it survives the somewhat corny pleading of its verses due to the everlasting and constantly refreshing pleasure of the chorus. The verses are, understandably, individualized in a way that makes clear the song’s mission statement. In the verses, there is a very specific you that is being spoken of, but when the chorus is extracted, the you becomes anyone in a room surrounded by people who love them, people in the mood for celebrating.

To exit here as we entered—considering the many modes and energies that encompass the feeling of a “youthful” summer, fleeting for some of us wandering the endless caverns of adulthood. I often return to a story from the summer of 2020. What stands out most in my memory about the uprisings in and around my city is how exhausted people were by the end of each day. With the exhaustion came some sense of gratitude for not having been swept away in a cop car, or having survived the gas sprayed into crowds, or whatever other violence the police decided to inflict on those gathered in the streets. The balm for this exhaustion, often, was someone dragging a speaker into the middle of a road at night, well after the cops decided they were done for the day, when the streets belonged to whoever still had it in them to celebrate getting through the hot, chaotic, rage-filled hours.

These were my favorite times, largely for how they unlocked that elusive myth of youthful freedom—nowhere to be, nothing to do except take advantage of space and a clock that felt slowed down. Someone would play songs, and Black folks would dance, and laugh, shout lyrics, and fall into each other. One day in August, someone was celebrating a birthday, which I only remember because when it came time to sing “Happy Birthday,” no one asked which version would be sung. Not many Black folks I have been around ever ask such a foolish question. The answer is already known. From out of the speakers came Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday” and when the chorus hit, the singing was loud enough to echo several blocks in every direction, carried on the backs of clapping hands, as it often is.

This moment, on the streets after protest, was merely one of the latest in a wide range of moments defined and earmarked by Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday,” and—more broadly—by Hotter Than July. The reality is that, had Stevie Wonder never made another album after Secret Life of Plants, what he’d already given the world would have been generous enough. A bounty to last several lifetimes. It is narrow and erroneous to consider Hotter Than July as only a “comeback” album, or a response to sceptical critics. It doesn’t come across, to me, as an album obsessed with proving worth, or even all that obsessed with showcasing the individual talents of the artist. For all that can be said of Hotter Than July’s legacy, what stands out the most is that it is an album of seemingly endless abundance. An album that asks not only “How do you want to feel?” but also, “How do you want to survive?” and then turns us towards the expansive forest of ever-shifting answers.

Stevie Wonder: Inside The Epic Magnum Opus ‘Songs in the Key of Life’ (1976)

From rollingstone.com

How singer-songwriter returned from brink of retirement to create painstaking, groundbreaking 1976 release

“Just because a man lacks the use of his eyes doesn’t mean he lacks vision,” Stevie Wonder once said, a warning to any who doubted the potency of his imagination. In the first half of the Seventies, he had visualized an untried musical path, one that took him far from the assembly line pop of his “Little Stevie, the Boy Genius” era during the early days of Motown. This road ultimately led to 1976’s majestic Songs in the Key of Life, a multi-disc 21-song collection that would be the 26-year-old’s crowning achievement. It’s the sound of a creatively emancipated young artist coming into his own, surrendering himself to his ambition and harnessing his power and potential.

The high watermark of Wonder’s so-called “classic period” – an unparalleled streak also encompassing Music of my Mind (1972), Talking Book (1972), Innervisions (1973), and Fulfillingness’ First Finale (1974) – it was the culmination of all that came before. “He took his life experience and put them all into Songs in the Key of Life,” Motown founder Berry Gordy reflected in a 1997 documentary. “And it worked.”

Wonder had been under contract to Gordy’s label since he was just 11 years old. Now a self-assured adult with a steady string of hits stretching back a decade, a “quarter life crisis” malaise began to take hold. The superstar began to openly discuss quitting the music industry altogether and moving to Ghana, where he believed his ancestral lineage could be traced. There, he planned to devote his considerable energy to assisting handicapped children and other humanitarian causes. Brightly colored dashiki tunics replaced his standard Motown-issue mod suits, an outward expression of the changes he felt within.

Wonder briefly touched on his fascination with the African nation in a 1973 interview with Rolling Stone, and soon these abstract notions began to solidify into something more concrete. During a press conference in Los Angeles the following March, he tentatively announced a final concert tour slated for the end of 1975 – when his recording contract was set to expire – with all proceeds earmarked for Ghanaian charities.

“I’ve heard of great needs in that part of the world, the African countries,” he told the Associated Press. “I believe that you have to give unselfishly. … You can sing about things and talk about things, but if your actions don’t speak louder than your words, you’re nothing.” The words were admirable, but some took the cynical view that this dramatic farewell tour was merely a ploy to put pressure on Motown when renegotiating his new contract.

He hardly needed the leverage. Gordy’s empire had taken a beating in first half of the decade due to changing musical tastes and economic depression. Knowing that he stood to lose his most consistent seller to a life of philanthropy – or lucrative offers from rivals at Epic and Arista Records – the label chief was prepared to move mountains of cash.

Wonder sent high-powered lawyer Johanan Vigoda to discuss his lengthy list of stipulations with new Motown president Ewart Abner, and board chairman Gordy, who described the negotiations in his memoirs as “the most grueling and nerve-racking we ever had.” When the dust cleared and the papers were signed, Wonder had a seven-year contract that promised him a $13 million advance (with the opportunity to net up to $37 million if he delivered more than his album-per-year minimum), 20 percent royalties, and control of his publishing. At the time, it was the biggest deal that had ever been done in the music industry. Time magazine noted that it was more than Elton John and Neil Diamond’s contracts combined.

“In those days $13 million was a lot of money,” Gordy wailed in the 1997 Classic Albums: Songs in the Key of Life documentary. “I’d heard that was an unprecedented deal, the most that had ever been paid. But I had to do it, because there was no way I was going to lose Stevie. … I was shaking in my boots!”

In addition to the financial windfall, the contract also offered Wonder the creative freedom to work anywhere he wanted, with any artist he desired, and veto power over any potential singles. A forthcoming triple-disc greatest hits package was canceled at the artist’s insistence, with all 200,000 copies sent to the incinerator. Most remarkably, Wonder’s permission was now required if Motown was ever to be sold in the future. The Beatles, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra: None of them wielded that much influence on their own label. The deal was the ultimate testament to Wonder’s status as Motown’s supreme talent.

“He broke tradition with the deal – legally, professionally – in terms of how he could cut his records and where he could cut,” Vigoda told Rolling Stone‘s Ben Fong-Torres. “And in breaking tradition he opened up a future for Motown. They never had an artist in 13 years. They had single records, they managed to create a name in certain areas, but they never came through with a major, major artist.”

The contract did a lot for Wonder, but Motown had done a lot for him. The imprint was a shining African-American success story.

“I’m staying at Motown, because it is the only viable surviving black-owned company in the record industry,” he said in a statement announcing the deal. “Motown represents hopes and opportunity for new as well as established black performers and producers. If it were not for Motown, any of us just wouldn’t have had the shot we’ve had at success and fulfillment. It is vital that people in our business – particularly the black creative community, including artists, writers and producers – make sure that Motown stays emotionally stable, spiritually strong and economically healthy.”

Three decades later in the Classic Albums documentary, Wonder remained appreciative of Gordy’s trust. “He was brave enough to take the chance – to take that challenge to say, ‘You know what? I believe in him enough to do this. I believe in the gamble.’ And he was a smart man.”

With the technicalities in place, Wonder immersed himself in a new project – his 18th album since 1962.

He had momentum from his previous record, 1974’s Fulfillingness’ First Finale. It was a comparatively somber assortment brimming with self-reflection and even traces of anger (see the Nixon blasting “You Haven’t Done Nothin’”). The disc was originally slated to be his first double album, and when those plans failed to materialize he announced that the excess tracks would be issued on a sequel, Fulfillingness’ First Finale Part II (or, naturally, Fulfillingness’ Second Finale).

Wonder previewed the work-in-progress to writers from Crawdaddy and Melody Maker in late 1974, playing a track called “The Future,” which included the cautionary line: “Don’t look at the world like a stranger, cause you know we are living in danger.” The gloomy song was “fantastically influenced” by the televised police ambush of the Symbionese Liberation Army – a far left revolutionary group then on the run with kidnapped heiress Patricia Hearst – in which many members were killed. “Livin’ Off the Love of the Land” is hardly any sunnier, containing lyrics like “Seems the wisdom of man hasn’t got much wiser,” and “Seems to me that fools are even more foolish.”

Perhaps aware that such caustic songs could alienate his audience and compromise his commercial performance, they were shelved and Fulfillingness’ Second Finale was abandoned. He vowed to start fresh on his next project, which was temporarily known as Let’s See Life the Way It Is. The final title came to him in a dream: Songs in the Key of Life.

For Wonder, the banner was a personal dare to expand his compositional range. “I challenged myself [to write] as many different things as I could, to cover as many topics as I could, in dealing with the title and representing what it was about,” he says in Classic Albums. “The title would give me a challenge, but equally as important as a challenge it would give me an opportunity to express my feelings as a songwriter and as an artist.”

It was a challenge he met head on, working to the point of obsession. Nonstop sessions stretched across two-and-a-half years, two coasts, and four studios: Crystal Sound in Hollywood, New York City’s Hit Factory, and the Record Plant outposts in Los Angeles and Sausalito. More often than not, he could be found in one of those spaces, sometimes for 48 hours at a time, chasing his muse with a rotating crew of engineers and support musicians. Over 130 people were involved in the recording, including Herbie Hancock, George Benson, “Sneaky Pete” Kleinow and Minnie Riperton. “If my flow is goin’, I keep on until I peak” became Wonder’s mantra.

“It went on for two years almost every day, many hours and huge amounts of material,” recalls John Fischbach, who co-engineered the majority of the sessions with Gary Olazabal. “I guess it was really his most prolific time. He did more songs in those two years I think than he had done before.”

Though the exact count is unknown, Wonder claims to have recorded several hundred tracks during the Songs in the Key of Life sessions – nearly all of which remain in the vault. The Prince-like figure is corroborated by Fischbach, who puts the number at “something like 200 songs” in various stages of completion. “Some would be sketched out, some were more finished than others and we just kept working until he had what he wanted,” he says.

Olazabal describes Wonder’s working methods as “frighteningly spontaneous,” often resulting in late night (or early morning) calls to collaborators. Gary Byrd had a particularly harrowing experience while co-writing the lyrics to the track “Village Ghetto Land.” He had labored for three months perfecting the words to what he believed to be the complete song. Then Wonder called him from the recording studio and casually informed him that he had added another verse. Could he whip up some more lyrics in the next 10 minutes? The band was waiting.

“There are ‘sessions’ and then there’s Stevie Time,” laughed keyboardist Greg Phillinganes on WBEZ’s Sound Opinions podcast in 2006. “We didn’t have formal sessions. We went to the studio and that was where you were.”

In addition to his loyal crew, Wonder had a secret weapon: a state-of-the-art analogue synthesizer called the Yamaha GX-1. The enormous instrument boasted three keyboards, multi-octave foot pedals, ribbon controller, a galaxy of buttons to recall sounds and modulate pitches, and even a built-in bench. “It could house a family of eight,” Phillinganes says with a touch of hyperbole. “It was huge.”

Along with the gargantuan size came a gargantuan cost. The GX-1 retailed for a staggering $60,000 (or $320,000 adjusted for inflation). Intended as a prototype for future consumer synths, only a handful were ever made – let alone sold. Most landed in the hands of industry heavyweights like Keith Emerson of prog rock legends Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones, and ABBA composer Benny Andersson. Wonder bought two.

The GX-1 had much to recommend itself to the multi-instrumentalist. Realistic (for the time) instrument samples allowed him to single-handedly layer complex orchestral beds. And unlike others synths available in that era, it was polyphonic, which allowed him to play multiple keys at once and create lush backing tracks in a fraction of the time.

Wonder dubbed the metallic behemoth “The Dream Machine,” and promptly put it to use on many of the album’s tracks – most notably “Village Ghetto Land” and “Pastime Paradise.”

The latter opens with an insistent cartwheeling fugue that borrows its first eight notes from Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Prelude No. 2 in C Minor.” Intended to mimic the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby,” the anxious instrumental phrase is made even more disorienting by the sound of a backwards gong that anticipates the chanting of Hare Krishnas heard on the fade out. The devotees were pulled in off the street on in a spur-of-the-moment burst of creativity.

“Gary [Olazabal] rounded them up on Hollywood Boulevard,” Fischbach recalled to Sound on Sound. “We had decided it would be great to have them on the song, so he went and talked to a bunch of those people and made arrangements for them to come to the studio.”

Crystal Studios was located in the east side of Hollywood, not far from the local headquarters. “They walked in line all the way from the Self-Realization Fellowship,” Olazabal added. “There must have been about a hundred of them, chanting and praying as they showed up to perform on the song, but Stevie never showed up. We didn’t know what to do, and so we just let them go into the studio. The main room was not very live-sounding, but it was very big. Well, they were in there for hours, chanting – they didn’t really interact much in any other way – and when Stevie didn’t appear we knew they’d have to walk all the way back and return another day.” Despite Wonder’s no-show, the Hare Krishna’s remained positive. “There was not a lot of hostility,” Olazabal says. “Except from us. It wasn’t easy to listen to that chanting for hours on end.”

The West Angeles Church of God Choir was also mixed into the outro, performing a version of the civil-rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” that weaved in and out of the Krishna’s incantations. The blend of higher consciousness and social consciousness, the eternal and the urgent, gave voice to the dreams swirling inside the young maestro.

But it was another vocal cameo that hit closest to home. Wonder became a father on February 5th, 1975, when partner Yolanda Simmons gave birth to Aisha Morris. “She was the one thing that I needed in my life and in my music for a long time,” he told Women’s Own magazine soon after. “Isn’t She Lovely” – a joyous celebration of parenthood – is perhaps the most obvious beneficiary of Wonder’s new inspiration. While actual birthing sounds edited onto the song’s intro are from another infant, Aisha can be heard laughing splashing around the bathtub with her father on the extended fade.

Wonder’s sister Renee Hardaway also makes a vocal contribution to Songs in the Key of Life, delivering the scornful “You nasty boy!” that punctuates the album’s lead single, “I Wish.” The final track completed for the project, its lyrics originally dealt with war and “cosmic spiritual stuff” until Wonder attended a Motown company picnic. The label had effectively served as a grammar school for the former child star, and the fun afternoon triggered a wave of nostalgia. He hastily scribed new lyrics about those early days, and at 3 a.m. called bassist Nathan Watts – who had just arrived home from a long day of recording. “Stevie called and said, ‘I need you to come back,” Watts told Bassplayer. “I’ve got this bad song!”

“Saturn,” a track on the album’s bonus EP, A Something’s Extra, also began as a fond look backwards. The lyrical location was originally “Saginaw,” Wonder’s Michigan birthplace, and intended as homage to his home in the mold of the Jackson 5’s “Goin’ Back to Indiana.” But the song was shifted into outer space when guitarist Mike Sambello (later to score a hit with the Flashdance favorite “Maniac”) misheard the title as the ringed planet. Much like the past, it’s described as an idealized utopia just out of reach.

Traces of Wonder’s family and personal history can be found all over the album. Wonder’s brother Calvin Hardaway co-wrote “Have a Talk With God,” and his former wife Syreeta Wright provides backing vocals on “Ordinary Pain.” Some even believe that “Ebony Eyes” – with its reference to a “Miss Beautiful Supreme” – is an ode to Wonder’s childhood infatuation with elder Motown labelmate, Diana Ross. “I had a crush on her,” he admitted to Vanity Fair in 2008. “When I came to Motown, she walked me around the building and showed me different things – she was wonderful.”

There’s also a compelling theory that the tune is actually a tribute to another Supreme, Florence Ballard, who had died in February 1976 of cardiac arrest at the age of 32. She had been fired from the trio nine years earlier for erratic behavior stemming from substance abuse and resentment over being usurped by Ross’ as the band’s frontwoman (it was she who came up with the group’s name). Her career remained mired in a morass of lawsuits, domestic-assault incidents, poverty, and alcoholism, never to recover.

Wonder would have been well acquainted with Ballard. A subtle nod to her premature passing would be in line with his mission to write about all aspects of life – even death.

Mortality, and musical immortality, is central to a much more blatant tribute, the jubilant “Sir Duke.” The song honors the jazz legend Duke Ellington, a formative influence on the young Wonder, who had died in 1974 before they were ever able to work together. “I knew the title from the beginning but [I] wanted it to be about the musicians who did something for us. So soon they are forgotten. I wanted to show my appreciation.” He namechecks Count Basie, Glenn Miller and Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald in the pantheon of greats, perhaps suspecting that his own name would one day be among them.

If it wasn’t already. Sessions for Songs on the Key of Life yielded some of the finest songs in his entire canon, including the celestial “Knocks Me off My Feet,” the intricate harmonies of “Love’s in Need of Love Today” and the Herbie Hancock-assisted “As.”

After basic recording was complete, Wonder insisted on endlessly remixing the tracks in an unlimited series of configurations. “It was a marathon, and at times we wondered if it would ever finish,” says Olazabal. “We had T-shirts with ‘Are We Finished Yet?’ printed on them, as well as others with ‘Let’s Mix ‘Contusion’ Again.’ Without exaggeration, we must have mixed that track at least 30 times. It became part of the joke of our lives.”

Wonder took to wearing these T-shirts around Motown headquarters to tease the supremely stressed-out executives who had never waited anywhere near this long for a product. “Nobody thought this project would go on as long as it did,” confirms Fischbach. Deadlines came and went with little concern from the artist, as the label made do with over a million advance orders on an album that didn’t technically exist.

By the fall of 1976, Wonder was ready. He had completed a double LP and bonus EP bursting at the seams with musical innovation. Songs in the Key of Life was a groundbreaking blend of funk, soul, pop and jazz, seasoned with cutting-edge technology. Amazingly, this bumper crop of forward-looking musical brilliance had its grand debut in the pastoral paradise of Long View Farm in rural North Brookfield, Massachusetts.

But that was just the final step in a long journey. The world press met in the lobby of Manhattan’s elegant Essex House on September 7th, 1976, at 7:30 a.m. There they gulped down a quick complimentary breakfast before being ushered onto three buses that drove them to Kennedy International Airport – but not before passing through Times Square for a peak at the $75,000, 60-by-400-foot billboard that had trumpeted the album for the past four months. Soon they were airborne in a chartered DC-9, well stocked with champagne and appetizers. Once the plane touched down at a small airport in Worcester, Massachusetts, the journalists were loaded onto a fleet of school buses for a short ride to the listening party.

Long View Farm was a 143-acre equestrian ground that had recently been renovated to include a world-class studio (used by the Rolling Stones, Cat Stevens, Aerosmith and the J. Geils Band, among many others). Guests were treated to hearty meals of roast beef, pie and more champagne while waiting for Wonder to make his entrance. He arrived resplendent in a gaudy cowboy get-up, complete with 10-gallon hat, leather fringe and a gun holster emblazoned with the words “Number One With A Bullet.” The whole gala cost Motown upwards of $30,000.

“Let’s pop what’s poppin’,” he announced as he hit play on the reel-to-reel tape machine, unleashing the music that had been gestating in the studio – and his soul – for so long.

Wonder’s opus popped immediately to the top of the charts. It became the third album in history to debut at Number One, remaining there for 14 weeks. It also earned him four Grammys, which he accepted via satellite while he was visiting Nigeria to explore his musical heritage. The experience was only slightly marred by a poor connection signal, prompting presenter Andy Williams to clumsily inquire, “Stevie, can you see us?”

Four decades have failed to dull the album’s power and awe-inspiring scope. It’s been cited as a favorite by figures like Prince, Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey – and Wonder himself.  “Of all the albums, Songs in the Key of Life I’m most happy about,” he told Q magazine in 1995. “Just the time, being alive then. To be a father and then letting go and letting God give me the energy and strength I needed.”

Stevie Wonder Characters (1987)

From Creem, March 1988

This is almost as satisfying a return to form as Sugar Ray Leonard’s victory over Marvelous Marvin Hagler and practically as much of an upset.

After all, Stevie’s really been on the skids since 1976’s Songs In The Key Of Life, and even that wasn’t up to the mind-altering troika-plus-one of Music Of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions and Fulfillingness’ First Finale. Now that was a streak of creativity combined with commercial success the likes of Prince and Michael Jackson still aspire to.

So it is no small praise indeed to say that Characters, Stevland Morris’s first effort since 1985’s In Square Circle, favorably evokes those halcyon days of ‘Superstition’, ‘You Are The Sunshine Of My Life’ and ‘Living For The City’. In fact, the new LP opener, ‘You Will Know’ is a spitting image of the latter, complete with its landscape of those “using pharmaceutical extractions to find the paradise” and “single parent(s) trying to raise their children.” It’s not surprising to discover that a number of the tracks on Characters – my guess is ‘With Each Beat Of My Heart’ and ‘Cryin’ Through The Night’, with the last-named sounding much like ‘Sunshine Of My Life’ – have been plucked from Stevie’s supposed storehouse of half-formed song ideas and demos. Whatever the case, they are timeless Stevie Wonder ballads that resonate emotionally with our memories of other, warmly familiar numbers from the past.

Characters is the first Stevie Wonder album in recent memory which arrived without both fanfare and frustration on the part of Motown over delays by its perfectionist genius. The two years between In Square Circle and the new LP are downright miniscule compared to the five-year wait which separated the former from its predecessor, 1980’s Hotter Than July. The lowered expectations result in a more ready acceptance of Characters‘ relaxed nature, while the album’s concept of shifting masks and personal identities is a far more effective frame than In Square Circle‘s abstract equations. In fact, the lilting township shuffle of ‘Dark ‘n Lovely’ and the playful funk of the first single, ‘Skeletons’, can’t hide the fact Stevie’s laying some heavy statements on us about apartheid and government interference with personal liberties, respectively. This is a welcome return to the old Wonder turf of hope and despair existing side by side against a decaying but colorful urban backdrop.

As prolific as Stevie Wonder is, it’s a crime the guy doesn’t release at least a record a year. Recently, Stevie announced that Characters would be the first of a proposed trilogy of records dealing with man’s self-image and conflicting roles which would take him into the next decade. Like Sugar Ray, Stevie Wonder has come back to prove he’s still capable of delivering a knockout punch. He might not dazzle technically like he used to, for now, Stevie Wonder prefers effortlessly employing the tools of his trade to create something more important than mere electronic wizardry. On ‘With Each Beat Of My Heart’, he incorporates his own heartbeat by miking it and using it in the mix of the song, and that’s getting closer to the point of Characters. Whether he’s jiving with Michael Jackson on the duet ‘Get It’ or wrestling with the ghost of Prince on a one-man effort like ‘Galaxy Paradise’, Stevie Wonder’s still the class of the (heavy) weight division. The man has returned to reclaim his crossover throne. And not a moment too soon…

Stevie Wonder Characters (1987)

From andresmusictalk.wordpress.com

Stevie Wonder had entered the 1980’s in an interesting musical position. He began the decade on a political crusade with the late Gil Scott-Heron to make Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday a national holiday. Musically however,his albums began coming fewer and farther between. Since becoming an innovative musical icon after his early/mid 70’s salad days,he was still commercially successful. But the blend of organic and electronic sounds and melodies he’d pioneered was mainstream by the early 80’s. So technically,he wasn’t considered to be so much of a musical innovator anymore.

That being said, Wonder’s songwriting approach was something very few could copy. Especially with all its jazzy complexities. Thus he began developing to the artist he is today: a man whose current music was based more on collaboration and songwriting for and with other artists. Most notably Jermaine Jackson’s “Let’s Get Serious” and Gary Byrd’s “The Crown” during the early 80’s. He only had three formal studio albums during the 80’s though. And the third of them was the 1987 album Characters. It had a home in my family’s cassette collection right when it came out. And fast entered my musical core.

Characters is an album that has garnered mix opinions from everyone from writers to critics to fans. A good deal of that has to do with it being from the late 80’s. And public opinion of changes in music during that time is a complex and controversial one. On a personal level however,its one of my very favorite albums by Stevie Wonder. It came out in a year that also included Prince’s Sign O The Times and when Michael Jackson’s Bad came out. So there was a renewed interests by soul/funk artists of making creatively and commercially successful music in what started as a rather rock based musical decade.

Now Characters is also an album that did indicate the continuing distance black American artists were having with the pop charts at the time. The Top 10 of the R&B charts in American placed the album right within it. He even did an MTV special featuring a guest appearance by the late Stevie Ray Vaughn to promote the album. But it landed only within the pop Top 20. Still that was enough for many people to appreciate Stevie Wonder making a new album at that time. Five years ago,I wrote a review of this album on Amazon.com going further into the albums more musical virtues.

Stevie Wonder had recorded his previous album In Square Circle in 1983 but released it in 1985. Even though its clear based on internet knowledge that Stevie didn’t write all of the songs on this particular album at the same time. On the other hand, the production was contemporary to its release. Stevie Wonder’s musical success was in a very interesting place in the late 80’s. At only a mere 37 years old Stevie, having been a child prodigy, was already a musically iconic figure before 40. Something of a modern day popular equivalent of a George Gershwin and Duke Ellington in terms of his body of musical accomplishment by this time.

He had created an entire template for funk composition in the 70’s. He was able to show the innovations of funk were not merely instrumentally challenging dance music,but could have its own style of songwriting to accompany it as well. By the 80’s,funk was changing into a more electronic style of dance music that didn’t (and still doesn’t) suit everyone’s fancy. The pop audience had also found a new darling in Michael Jackson,an artist Stevie once helped mentor. For his part Stevie seemed to have no trouble dealing with this. The R&B community still regarded him as their main man,and that hadn’t (and still hasn’t) changed. So in terms of his commercial output,on this album he went more for quality than quantity.

“You Will Know” is a beautifully dreamy mid tempo slow groove opener,with Stevie’s classic multi layered keyboards playing his complex chord structures on a song that pleas for hope among the hopeless. “Dark ‘N’ Lovely” is an intense,uptempo dance/funk piece with some heavy bass Clavinet type synthesizer work mixed with spacier electronics that reflected a theme of darker hued African American’s as being treated differently in society.

“In Your Corner” takes this modern electronic funk instrumentation on a song that reflects more the flavor of 60’s Motown-with a tale that basically picks up where “I Wish” left off:Stevie’s possible imagined (or real for all we know) life as a young adult. “With Each Beat Of My Heart” is a mostly acapella ballad,built upon some transcendent multi tracked harmonies from Stevie and him breathing in the rhythm of a heart beat itself-providing mainly piano and harmonica as the other instrumentation.

“One Of A Kind” is a deeply funky dance number, again built on dynamic harmony and Stevie’s poetically lovelorn lyrical preoccupation. “Skeletons” is a strong funk mashup of themes between “Superstition” and “Part Time Lover”-not too far in flavor from Cameo’s Word Up only a bit warmer and gentler in instrumental flavor.

“Get It” is a heavy dance/funk number-again duetting with Michael Jackson to return the favor from “Just Good Friends” on MJ’s Bad-finding the two aggressively trading off lyrics call and response. The clavinet based funk returns on the wondrously grooving “My Eyes Don’t Cry” whereas “Come Let Me Make Your Love Come Down” marries Stevie’s electronic grooves with a heavy blues featuring a guitar solo from B.B.King playing Lucille herself.

“Crying Through The Night” is one of my own favorites here-a Latin flavored number updated from a song he recorded in the mid 70’s. The two most intriguing songs are “Galaxy Paradise”,which strongly anticipates R&B/funk’s near obsession with Arabic melodies in the 80’s funk context and “Free”,which brings to mind his Bach-styled Clavinet “classical funk” sound for some dynamic “people music”.

This album is actually one of my very favourites of Wonder’s-certainly his finest of the 1980’s for me, as well as his last release of the decade. Not only did he dip strongly into his celebration of the innovation of funk, jazz, soul and European classical that defined his blockbuster 70’s successes but also had the time to anticipate a few modern day funk/soul musical concepts along the way as well. As controversial as this might sound to some 1980’s musical naysayers, this album is easily as innovative and thrilling for its era as Songs in the Key of Life was a decade before this.

Just listening to any Stevie Wonder album, especially if someone is seriously learning about music, can be a school lesson in sound layering and composition in itself. And at the end of the day, Characters was no exception to that rule. Even myself making music on Garage Band with Apple Loops now, I find myself hearing melodic/rhythmic combinations the way Wonder might. Says a lot for Stevie Wonder’s music influencing the creativity of a non musician…sound mixer. Characters above all things showcases how no matter when he created, Stevie Wonder’s sound remained intensely vital.

Just listening to any Stevie Wonder album, especially if someone is seriously learning about music, can be a school lesson in sound layering and composition in itself. And at the end of the day, Characters was no exception to that rule. Even myself making music on Garage Band with Apple Loops now, I find myself hearing melodic/rhythmic combinations the way Wonder might. Says a lot for Stevie Wonder’s music influencing the creativity of a non musician…sound mixer. Characters above all things showcases how no matter when he created, Stevie Wonder’s sound remained intensely vital.

Stevie Wonder In Square Circle (1985)

From rollingstone.com

Stevie Wonder has been laying low for the past five years. He couldn’t help writing a few songs to fill out the hits compilation Original Musiquarium I, or knocking out soundtrack ditties for ‘The Woman in Red’; the man has hit making in his blood. Yet he must have gone through some kind of crisis, because not since 1980’s ‘Hotter Than July’ has he released a full-length, stand-on-its-own album. Since he’s waited that long, the new album, In Square Circle, takes on the lineaments of a major statement — but the statement is, No change here.

‘In Square Circle’ will segue into any Wonder song since the mid-Seventies; like them, it revels in bubbling synthesizers, jazzy chords, puppy-friendly lyrics and, most of all, melodies that stick to your pleasure centers like audio caramel. It has all the stuff Little Stevie Wonder soaked up as a child star at Motown in the 1960s, before he broke away from the hit factory: the neatly tucked-in, crossover-ready hints of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley and, naturally, first-generation Motown, as in the new album’s “Part-Time Lover.”

There are love songs waiting for their Grammy Awards, a poor-folks number or two and even a message tune (à la “Happy Birthday” and “Don’t Drive Drunk”), “It’s Wrong (Apartheid),” which will probably have P.W. Botha tapping his toes. From now till Christmas, you’ll be hearing the album on CHR and adult-contemporary and rock formats — maybe even MTV, which just barely got around to playing Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You” when it was Number One — and you’ll be humming along.

Like Musiquarium, In Circle Square has a concept per side: love songs on side one, social-comment songs on side two (although Wonder inserts one more slice of dreaminess, “Overjoyed,” before he denounces apartheid). Wonder has already written so many memorable tunes that perhaps his new songs can’t help looking back to their predecessors; you can flip through your collection and connect the chromatics of “I Love You Too Much” to “You’ve Got It Bad Girl,” the beat and the keyboard tones of “Go Home” to “All I Do,” or the sweep of “Whereabouts” back to “Ribbon in the Sky” and “Lately,” if that’s your idea of a good time.

Along with his sense of harmony, though, Wonder sounds so trademarked because he keeps things smooth. All around him, people are using synthesizers for blips and crunches and zaps; Wonder prefers throooms and doo-wahs — sustained sounds, or, for rhythm, a ripple here and there.

Sonically, what’s new is Wonder’s playful ease with digitally sampled sounds, probably from a Fairlight. The instrument can take a real-world noise, analyze it and spread it up and down a keyboard for various manipulations. Instead of scat-singing in “Stranger on the Shore of Love,” he takes a digitally sampled “doo” and plays leaping keyboard solos; the splashes in “Overjoyed” are probably digital, as are the metallic noises in “It’s Wrong” and the boings that give “I Love You Too Much” a goofy lift.

I could go on and on about how swell the tunes are on In Circle Square — and if you’re the kind of person who likes to slap a good album into the cassette deck and forget it, stop reading here. Because much as I admire Wonder’s skill, spirit and inexhaustible hooks, when I hum along with In Circle Square I feel a little like I’ve been had.

For one thing, Wonder seems to be sticking to his reflexes again. On Journey through the Secret Life of Plants, the 1979 double album no one bought, Wonder reached into African, Indian and Asian music, experiments that paid off on Hotter Than July. Doubtless as a result of commercial pressure, In Circle Square retrenches itself in American-style pop; although it still leaves imitators — from Boy George to Narada Michael Walden — in the dust, it’s pretty conservative for Wonder.

Then there are the lyrics. Like Paul McCartney, his less swinging British counterpart in melodyland, Wonder has a treacly streak that pays off in hit singles. (For me, it reached overload with “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” a song that is either completely icky-poo or the monologue of a Don Juan establishing an alibi.) The love songs on In Square Circle are benign as usual, putting just a little tension into the romance in “Part-Time Lover” and “Stranger on the Shore of Love,” but the message songs are dubious.

Usually, Wonder fights his own sweetness-and-light tendencies by slipping in a tough lyric or two among the hummables — surprising down-to-earth stuff like “Living for the City” or “Cash in Your Face” or “Big Brother.” On In Square Circle, three social-comment songs open side two. “Spiritual Walkers” righteously defends those Jehovah’s Witness types who sell Jesus door-to-door; amusingly, it’s set to a rewrite of “Superstition,” which had a more cynical view of believing in “things that you don’t understand.” “Land of La La,” with its ominous rock guitars, tells how ambitious boys and girls leave their small town and get ripped off in the big city; “Go Home” is a self-pitying saga of how Stevie told a loyal girl to bug off and then his life fell apart.

One song praising fundamentalist fanatics, one blame-the-victim number and one male-chauvinist special — the girl in “Go Home” agrees to do what Stevie tells her, and he’s proud to have that small authority — hint at a Stevie Wonder album for the Reagan era.

Still, let’s not overdo it. At press time, I hadn’t heard “Sun City,” but a catchy antiapartheid tune like “It’s Wrong” on an album destined for millions of listeners is no small thing. And while I disagree with “Spiritual Walkers” and distrust “Land of La La,” I don’t mind singing along — ditto for the rest of In Circle Square. Wonder seems immune to the current epidemic of posturing self-importance, and with his unforced optimism and his no-sweat audio perfectionism, he makes your ears happy, again and again. On In Square Circle, he’s as irresistible as ever.

Stevie Wonder Songs In The Key Of Life (1976)

From classicrockreview.com

The incredibly long and ambitious Songs In the Key of Life became the tour-de-force of Stevie Wonder‘s prolific seventies.

The album consisted of two LPs plus an addition four-song EP, a total 85 minutes of music from its 21 total songs. Wonder’s songs dealt with a variety of subjects many of which were the serious issues of the day and the musical performances are considered some of the best of his career. Because of its incredible length and rich arrangements, Songs In the Key of Life took a year longer than expected to complete, which made for a stressful situation between Wonder and Motown Records founder Berry Gordy, especially since Gordy had just given Wonder the largest record contract in history in 1975. It was a seven-album, $37 million deal with Wonder guaranteed full artistic control, and Gordy and the world eagerly awaited the first album of this new contract to be completed.

The album was finally released at the end of September 1976, and by early October it was already number one on the Billboard Pop Albums Chart, where it stayed for thirteen consecutive weeks into 1977 and eventually became the second best-selling album of that year. Songs In the Key of Life also became the most successful Stevie Wonder album as far as charting singles, and several of the songs were even the basis for hip-hop standards decades later. The album also became Wonder’s third in four years to win the Grammy for Album of the Year, winning previously in 1974 and 1975 for Innervisions and Fulfilligness’ First Finale respectively. Wonder also won Grammys for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance, Best Male Rhythm and Blues Performer, and Producer of the Year in 1977.

Although a total of 130 people worked on the album, many of the songs on the album were performed entirely by Wonder. The album took the listener through a journey of musical styles, recollections, and observations about issues ranging from childhood, first love, faith, social issues, and the downtrodden.

When Stevie Wonder chose the title, he set an ambitious personal goal to live up to its billing. He worked with a core group of musicians laying down many of the funk-oriented tracks while independently developing several of the more innovative tracks. Although this diverse album does have amazing cohesion, the first two original sides and EP seem to be far superior to sides three and four, which are still good but far less dazzling. All that being said, side one starts with an odd sequence of songs.

“Love’s In Need of Love Today” starts with deep harmonies before breaking into an R&B ballad. Like many songs later on the album, it contains a very long outro with much vocal improvisation all the way to the end. “Have a Talk with God” is performed in total by Wonder, mostly synths with some drums and a nice lead. “Village Ghetto Land” is completely original, with orchestral parts performed on the Yamaha “dream machine” the lyrics were written by Gary Byrd, who actually recited them over the phone to Wonder minutes before he recorded the song. The fourth song, “Contusion” is actually the first to use a “band” arrangement. It is (almost) an instrumental with just some scat vocals and where Wonder really takes a backseat to the other musicians like guitarist Michael Sembello.

“Sir Duke” finishes side one and is a true classic. The song was written in tribute to jazz legend Duke Ellington, who died in 1974. Ellington had a strong influence on Wonder as a musician and he wanted to write a song acknowledging musicians he felt were important. Originally done on 16 track but later on the new 24 track recorder, “Sir Duke” is one of the great songs from the era, fresh and bold with lots of harmonized brass upfront and a fantastic vocal melody by Wonder.

The A Something’s Extra 7″ EP was included with many editions the original album and the tracks are on most CD versions. It contains four fine tracks, starting with Sembello’s “Saturn”, who got the title when he misinterpreted Wonder’s singing “Saginaw” (the town of his birth). It is a pleasant ballad with a bit of edginess and marching piano. “Ebony Eyes” is a great, upbeat boogie-woogie piano song with strong bass by Nathan Watts and drums by Wonder and really cool instrumentation in the arrangement including a talkbox, a steel guitar, and a great growling sax lead. “All Day Sucker” is another synth-driven, hyper funk song, while “Easy Goin’ Evening (My Mama’s Call)” starts kind of dramatic but eases into a nice jazz rhythm with a Fender Rhodes electric piano, topped by Wonder’s double-tracked harmonica.

Side two kicks off with “I Wish”, a song that is nearly impossible not to dance to at every listen. It revolves around several very complex synth and bass lines that mesh together like a funky symphony. The song was the first and most successful hit off the album, with nostalgic lyrics. “Knocks Me Off My Feet” begins with a lounge act piano until it works into a nice romantic ballad with some very interesting and intense sections.

“Pastime Paradise” is another complex art piece, which contains a reverse gong and strings from the “dream machine” that Wonder says were influenced by the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby”. It also contains some very complex, Latin-influenced percussion with bells and two full choral groups singing completely different parts simultaneously. Yet somehow it all comes together in a beautiful and haunting piece. “Summer Soft” is a beautiful piano tune that breaks into nice ensemble with stronger instrumentation, with the end of the song going through many key changes, becoming more and more intense on each iteration until giving way to a closing organ lead by Ronnie Foster. “Ordinary Pain” finishes the fantastic second side as another very pleasant melody with a strong, thumping rhythm which turns sharply about midway through to a new-fangled funk with vocals by Shirley Brewer.

The third LP side starts with “Isn’t She Lovely?”, which would become one of Wonder’s all time popular songs. Written in celebration ofthe the birth of his daughter, Wonder incorporated sounds from home to complement the excellent piano riff, vocal melody, and sweet harmonica lead during the long outtro. “Joy Inside My Tears” contains a slow and steady drum beat played by Wonder with really subdued vocals. “Black Man” has a strong synth presence and 1980s type deep funk (in 1976), with a section of long question and answer chanting at the end.

On the fourth side, “If It’s Magic” stands out as a unique piece containing on harp by Dorothy Ashby and vocals with a little harmonica by Wonder. “As” is an upbeat R&B ballad dominated by the chorus hook sung by background singers with Wonder improvising much of the lead vocals. “Another Star” finishes the side with an almost disco-beat above some Caribbean-influenced piano and percussion and is yet another song with a long outro of consistent riff and improvised vocals.

Songs In the Key of Life was an incredible success on all fronts and would serve as a major influence for scores artists over the coming decades. It was also the absolute apex of a very long career by Stevie Wonder.

Stevie Wonder Innervisions (1973)

From classicrockreview.com

Innervisions is an album themed on social issues, drugs, spirituality, and urban life by Stevie Wonder in 1973.

Wonder did virtually everything on this album from songwriting to producing to playing the vast majority of the album’s instruments and it may have been an attempt to replicate Marvin Gaye’s landmark 1971 What’s Going On album. Innervisions achieved similar artistic and commercial results to that previous album with the added dimension of musical innovation. Wonder put all the different topics and themes into a striking vision (or “Innervision”) which would be one of the most effective and entertaining of Wonder’s long career.

Although he was only 23 years old at the time of its release, Innervisions was already Wonder’s 16th studio album, all on Motown’s Tamla label. However, it was the first on which he composed every song and virtually played every instrument. He made heavy use of the ARP synthesizer, which was popular at the time because of its ability to construct a full sound environment. Many considered this album to be the pinnacle of Wonder’s long career. As one reviewer put it at the time;

Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions is a beautiful fusion of the lyric and the didactic, telling us about the blind world that Stevie inhabits with a depth of musical insight that is awesome…”

The album peaked at number four on the U.S. album charts and became Stevie Wonder’s first album ever to reach the U.K. Top 10. It also won the 1974 Grammy Award for Album of the Year.

The album’s first side begins with the pre-disco funk of “Too High”, where Wonder shows off his instrumental skills on Fender Rhodes, harmonica, synthesized bass, and especially drumming (a talent he rarely receives credit for). “Visions” is one song in which Wonder doesn’t completely dominate. Acoustic guitars are provided by Dean Parks with refrained electric by David “T” Walker and upright double bass by Malcolm Cecil . Despite the arrangement being extremely sparse, Wonder still manages to forge some great vocal melodies.

“Living for the City” is a cinematic composition of civic injustice with great musical drive and interesting interludes with synth riffs. The lyrics are delivered with an exaggerated growl for effect and a dramatic spoken part describes the life of a young man who migrates from Mississippi to New York City, only to be tricked into transporting drugs, arrested, and sentenced to 10 years in jail. Wonder intentionally got his voice very hoarse for the recording. “Golden Lady” is a mellow ballad with a funky bass above a jazzy piano. It is a great way to complete side one, with judicious but effective use of synthesizers and a Hammond organ lead by Clarence Bell.

Side two starts with “Higher Ground”, a “peoples” song dominated by the Hohner clavinet with a Mu-tron III envelope filter pedal. This tune is completely performed by Wonder and reached #4 on the U.S. pop chart. Reportedly, he wrote and recorded the song all within a three-hour burst of creativity in May 1973. The weakest part of the album follows with “Jesus Children of America” and “All in Love Is Fair”, not terrible songs, but certainly not Wonder’s best.

The very Latin influenced “Don’t You Worry ’bout a Thing” is the lightest and most fun song on the album, with great vocal dynamics and inventiveness. Beginning with an unusual skit (which would proliferate decades later on hip-hop songs), this piano-led tune about a faux hero repeats the Spanish phrase ‘Todo ‘stá bien chévere’ which means “everything is really cool” and reached the Top 20 on the U.S. charts. Another charting hit, “He’s Misstra Know-It-All” finishes the album with Wonder once again playing all instrumentation, including multiple backing vocals. The song had a second charting life in 1977, when it was released on the B-side of “Sir Duke” and tells the story of a con man.

Three days after the release of Innervisions, Wonder was critically injured in a car accident in North Carolina. His head injuries placed him in a coma for four days and he permanently lost his sense of smell. As he recovered, Wonder was deeply concerned that he might have also lost his musical faculty and was hesitant to even attempt to play the clavinet that was brought to his hospital room. Finally he played and his spirit quickly returned and his recovery accelerated as Stevie Wonder continued into the prime of his creative career.

Stevie Wonder Music Of My Mind (1972)

From sfloman.com

As previously noted, when Stevie turned 21 his Motown contract ran out, and though he felt loyalty towards Motown, he didn’t re-sign with them until they not only upped the ante monetarily but also gave him full artistic control of his albums, which was quite a concession for the label at that time.

Of course, Stevie would prove to be well worth the investment, though not at first as Music Of My Mind spawned no major hits and was something of a commercial disappointment. It is a very good album, though, and is now seen as being the first of the five successive albums on which his reputation primarily rests, at least the good part of his reputation, anyway. Wonder plays everything on all but two tracks; Art Baran adds a trombone solo to “Love Having You Around” and Buzzy Feiton adds some tasty jazz guitar to “Superwoman (Where Were You When I Needed You),” otherwise it’s all Stevie, all the time.

As if to announce that things would be different from now on, those same first two tracks, “Love Having You Around” and “Superwoman (Where Were You When I Needed You),” ambitiously run on for 7:26 and 8:07, respectively. With a big assist from producers Bob Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil, two key contributors to Wonder’s classic period, Music From My Mind was his first album to prominently feature the futuristic sounds of the clavinet synthesizer, which would not only dominate his sound but the ’70s funk and fusion movements in general.

Songs such as “Love Having You Around” and “Keep On Running” are long, repetitive, but quite funky synth-led jams, though these songs and perhaps a couple of others last well past what their expiration dates should’ve been. The album has other problems as well. For example, the vocoder enhanced vocals that occasionally appear may have sounded cutting edge back then, but they sound like a cheesy, dated gimmick now, and lyrically Wonder (now the primary lyricist, though Syreeta co-authors one song and Yvonne Wright assists on two) seems confused.

On one hand, songs such as the blatantly commercial, warmly upbeat sing along “I Love Everything About You,” “Happier Than The Morning Sun,” a rare guitar-led song that exudes a lovely, low-key Sunday morning type of vibe, and “Seems So Long,” another pure pop ballad with wonderful vocals, are breath taking ballads that seem true to what Wonder is all about. Elsewhere, however, songs such as “Superwoman (Where Were You When I Needed You),” the so-so “Sweet Little Thing,” and “Keep On Running” see Stevie adopting a macho, not especially likeable character (I think it’s a character, unless it is Stevie himself) that’s totally at odds with the Stevie we’ve come to know and the Stevie that appears on the rest of the album.

Hearing Stevie sing “don’t make me get mad and act like a nigger” on “Sweet Little Thing” is shocking, to put it mildly, and not in a good way, though fortunately the lovely melody of “Superwoman” still wins out despite some regrettably sexist lyrics, and “Keep On Running” has quite the nice extended groove, though again it’s hard to look past its stalker lyrics.

On the plus side, in addition to this albums pioneering use of electronics and some stellar songs that demonstrate Stevie’s increasingly diverse musicality, his smooth but soulful, much multi-tracked vocals are more confident and expressive than ever. Ending with a bang, the gospel-tinged “Evil,” the only overtly religious song on the album, has an epic, majestic feel. As if to further demonstrate the conflicted nature of this album, which is mostly excellent musically but which lacks a solid emotional core, the song ends suddenly, purposely, with the following devastating denouement: “sweet love, all alone, an outcast of the world.”