Stevie Wonder

100 Best Albums

Essential Albums

  • Songs in the Key of Life
    Songs in the Key of Life
    Songs in the Key of Life

    100 Best Albums In 1974, Stevie Wonder was the most critically revered pop star in the world; he was also considering leaving the music industry altogether. So when Songs in the Key of Life was released two years later, demand was so high that it became, at the time, the fastest-selling album in history. Wonder positioned himself as the purveyor of a vast self-drawn cosmos, one with a remarkable cache of songs: Songs in the Key of Life, which runs nearly 90 minutes, is effortlessly melodic, broad in scope, deeply personal—and often just plain weird. Start with the brassy and positively effusive chart-topping singles “Sir Duke” and “I Wish”, both nostalgic and modern-sounding at once. At the other end of the spectrum: the stark reality of “Village Ghetto Land” and “Pastime Paradise”, on which Wonder decries the abandonment of the civil rights dream. Then there’s the joyous “Isn’t She Lovely”, celebrating the arrival of Wonder’s daughter Aisha. As Songs in the Key of Life nears its conclusion, Wonder returns to the dance floor for 15 minutes of sumptuous gospel-disco in “As” and “Another Star”, each expressing a deep passion in layers of instrumentation and impressive vocal runs. But Stevie isn’t done; another defining moment on the album is a bonus track, one originally issued as an extra 45 with the album’s vinyl release. It starts in deep space with the Afrofuturist fantasia “Saturn”, and then, as its last synthesiser chords fade out, Wonder zooms light-years to an urban playground where we can hear the sound of children skipping Double Dutch. Sonically, culturally and emotionally, Songs in the Key of Life is much more than a gigantic collection of songs—it forms an entire world view.

  • Fulfillingness' First Finale
    Fulfillingness' First Finale
    Fulfillingness' First Finale

    We find Stevie Wonder in a ruminative, reflective place on 1974’s Fulfillingness’ First Finale. A supreme humanist, he encourages the enthusiastically sunny “Smile Please” to coexist with the desolate confessions of “Too Shy to Say”. The spry, needling, synth-soaked funk of “Boogie on Reggae Woman” almost steals the show, though the melodic intelligence of “Heaven Is 10 Zillion Light Years Away” is just as crucial. Even the downcast moods of “Creepin’” and “Please Don’t Go” provide more than enough musical fizz to tickle the ears of a heartbroken listener.

  • Innervisions
    Innervisions
    Innervisions

    100 Best Albums On the heels of his first post-Motown-emancipation masterpiece Music of My Mind, 1972 was Stevie Wonder’s biggest year yet. He opened for The Rolling Stones on their enormous US summer tour, exposing his exploratory soul-funk hybrid to countless rock fans, and released his second opus Talking Book before the end of the year. An April 1973 Rolling Stone interview dubbed the erstwhile teen-pop star “The Formerly Little Stevie Wonder” and quoted the 23-year-old as saying that he wanted to “get in as much weird shit as possible”; 1973’s Innervisions was a start. The boldest political statement of Wonder’s career yet—assailing drug addicts, infrastructural racism, charismatic con men and superficial Christians—Innervisions was also deliriously funky and boundary-pushing. Wonder played and produced just about everything, with the help of his experimentally minded studio sous-chefs Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff. The musical peaks were as high as Wonder would ever get, though the tone was more pointed than ever. “Living for the City” is a feverish seven-minute operetta about the unforgiving toll of urban life for the Black working class in the post-Black Power moment. With the journalistic soul of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On broadcast straight from the street corner and central booking, “Living” is among the most scathingly beautiful indictments of the American justice system. The album-ending slow burn “He’s Misstra Know-It-All” suavely identifies the character types who prey on those same marginalised people, including, many surmised, the soon-to-resign “law and order”-claiming US president. There’s salvation to be found in “Higher Ground”, an impossibly groovy sequel to Talking Book’s No. 1 funk odyssey “Superstition” that asserts Wonder’s belief in reincarnation over his trademark wah-wah clavinet and Moog bass; the tongue-in-cheek Latin workout “Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing”, a Dylanesque barb at a social climber delivered with a potent display of Wonder’s bottomless charm; and the hopelessly romantic “Golden Lady”, which spirals upward into the kind of ecstatic joy that only Wonder could generate. Both a kiss-off to late-’60s hippie optimism and a pathway to numerous possible spiritual futures, Innervisions cemented Wonder as the most inspired and singular mind in 1970s American popular music.

  • Talking Book
    Talking Book
    Talking Book

    The most effective way to explain the importance of Stevie Wonder’s 1972 album Talking Book is by examining its two hit singles, each of which became a modern classic. The first was “Superstition”, which Wonder had originally written for Jeff Beck, but wisely decided to record for himself, too. Over an impossibly funky snare groove of swung sixteenth notes, Wonder coaxes a rhythmic croak out of his Hohner Clavinet D6, and then adds a Moog bassline, a horn chart and a lyric about the vagaries of belief and rational thought that could, with some edits, date to the Enlightenment. (And, by the way, he wrote, played and sang everything.) Four months after “Superstition” topped the pop charts, the same thing happened with “You Are the Sunshine of My Life”, a lullaby-sweet ballad with a lyrical sentiment that could’ve been drawn from the Great American Songbook, featuring a glimmering electric piano line and intricate backing harmonies that fit perfectly into the early blossoming of R&B’s quiet storm era. Here were the alpha and omega of Stevie Wonder, a hitmaker equally capable of algebraic funk and starry-eyed sweetness—someone who, like Michael Jackson, the nation had known since he was a soul prodigy. As it turned out, the now-twentysomething Wonder had a lot more to say. He’d been evolving at a steady pace since dropping the “Little” from his name in the mid-1960s. But Talking Book was his most significant leap forward yet. With “Superstition” and “Big Brother”—the latter a dig at early 1970s surveillance culture masquerading as Black political leadership—Wonder demonstrated that he could keep pace with politically minded peers like Sly Stone and Curtis Mayfield. With an ever-growing arsenal of cutting-edge instruments at his disposal, and few if any creative limits, Wonder began his unprecedented imperial stage on Talking Book. Even deep cuts like “Maybe Your Baby” and “Tuesday Heartbreak” expressed simmering romantic paranoia through, respectively, sultry funk and deceptively joyous soul. After more than a decade of standing in Berry Gordy’s significant shadow at Motown, Wonder used Talking Book to demonstrate that he’d mastered the ability to merge the dark and the light.

  • Music of My Mind
    Music of My Mind
    Music of My Mind

    By 1972, Stevie Wonder was already established as Motown’s in-house wunderkind. He’d released a stunning 13 studio albums for the legendary label before he was 21—including a 1963 live album titled The 12 Year Old Genius. As the 1970s dawned, however, Wonder began chafing at the creative restraints imposed upon him by the famously restrictive Motown founder Berry Gordy, and followed labelmate Marvin Gaye in negotiating a new contract, one that gave Wonder full creative control over his music, as well as the opportunity to experiment—both musically and politically. The back cover of Music of My Mind even includes a declaration of independence: “Stevie Wonder comes of age…Now he’s free,” it reads, before noting “this album is virtually the work of one man.” To be sure, Music was nowhere near as revolutionary as Gaye’s What’s Going On. At this point in his artistic evolution, Wonder’s newly untethered imagination was focused mostly on his exuberance (and worry) regarding his new marriage to singer-songwriter Syreeta Wright. Still, the album does find him pushing his ultramodern musical gizmos to their limits: On the seven-and-a-half-minute opener “Love Having You Around”, Wonder engineers a joyous and funky robot romanticism from the talk box and Moog bass, both of which accompany his trademark clavinet. That leads into the bittersweet ballad “Superwoman”, which finds Wonder patiently mansplaining his insecurity at the titular lady (widely assumed to be Wright) who wants to become a star herself. It’s an eight-minute mini-epic, one that picks up the narrative thread from Wonder’s 1971 weeper “Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer”—proof of Wonder’s budding fondness for self-referential concept records. But while the solemn “Summer” could’ve been released in the 1950s, the second half of “Superwoman” sounds like the future, courtesy of the shimmering, otherworldly tones Wonder wrenches from a room-sized analogue synth named TONTO, built by ambitious musician-engineers Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff. Wonder took to TONTO because, he later explained, it seemed like the only medium capable of translating his fountain of musical ideas into recorded sound. Fittingly, Music of My Mind concludes with “Evil”, a relatively concise, TONTO-assisted production that sounds like a more soulful Emerson, Lake & Palmer production, and which finds Wonder offering his first statement on the malevolent forces threatening the modern world. He was just getting started.

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About Stevie Wonder

An impassioned vocalist, prodigious multi-instrumentalist and visionary producer, Stevie Wonder is a truly transformative figure in the history of popular music. That he’s accomplished it without his sight is both the most astonishing and least remarkable thing about him. First emerging as a child star in the early ’60s, covering Ray Charles standards under the name Little Stevie Wonder, Stevland Hardaway Judkins (born in Saginaw, Michigan, in 1950) would, by decade’s end, graduate to the more sophisticated soul of Motown-defining singles like “For Once in My Life”, showing future teen idols like Justin Timberlake and Justin Bieber how to gracefully age out of kinder-pop novelty. As Black Power politics seeped into the early-’70s cultural landscape, Stevie became a symbol of both the movement’s righteous indignation and its hope for a more socially just world. His staggering run of classic albums—from 1972’s Talking Book to 1976’s Songs in the Key of Life—helped lend legitimacy to the LP format for black soul/R&B pop artists who, with few exceptions, were wrongly relegated to singles status. With them, he showed how speaking up and getting down were not mutually exclusive ideals, fashioning a singular style of psychedelic funk where even the grittiest tracks, such as “Higher Ground”, were infused with spiritual uplift. (And in writing, performing and producing much of the material all on his own, he established the model of artist-as-auteur embraced by funk pioneers like Prince and rap icons like Kanye West.) But even in this fruitfully experimental phase, Stevie was still producing eternal wedding slow-dance standards like “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” and “Isn’t She Lovely”, and as the ’80s beckoned, he effortlessly adapted to the times with the synth-slicked soul of “Part-Time Lover” and the irresistible adult-contemporary serenade “I Just Called to Say I Love You”. While his output slowed after the ’90s, he remains a ubiquitous, towering figure in pop: Whether he’s singing at Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration or blowing harmonica on Mark Ronson’s 2015 hit album, Uptown Special, a Stevie Wonder appearance carries all the grandeur and gravitas of a papal blessing.

HOMETOWN
Saginaw, MI, United States
BORN
13 May 1950
GENRE
R&B/Soul

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