His next releases, 1973’s Innervisions and Fulfillingness’ First Finale in 1974 (which followed a serious automobile accident that left him in a coma for four days) won back-to-back Album of the Year trophies at the Grammys. “Black Man” served as a literal history lesson, calling out examples of how all colors and cultures have contributed to global progress.
‘Songs In The Key Of Life’: Revisiting Stevie Wonder’s Magnum Opus This is a genuine classic, in a world where that has become an overused citation.
Wonder, expressing frustration with America in the aftermath of Watergate and the never-ending war in Vietnam, had started to talk about quitting the music industry and moving to Ghana to work with handicapped children.
It required several dozen musicians on stage to recreate the album’s arrangements, with full horn and string sections (that harp! The year 1976 was, of course, America’s Bicentennial year, and especially at a time of such frustration and distrust surrounding the government and the country’s institutions, U.S. residents were bombarded with stories of our history and heroics.
“Another Star” bursts with an aching, tender passion —, For you There might be a brighter star But through my eyes the light of you is all I see. The sequence is framed by groups of Schubert songs – a mix of familiar numbers such as Die Forelle, An die Musik and Wandrers Nachtlied, with less well-known late songs – and precedes Rihm’s cycle with Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte. Though there were murmurs about an album release later that year, Wonder first took time off, then kept adding songs to the stockpile he had amassed, then decided there was more mixing and post-production required. This song, like a number of the longer cuts on the album, drags into repetition at the end but Stevie’s vocals are so charged and varied that he pushes you past the point of boredom; the words themselves fade as that voice grabs hold. Like all double albums, Songs in the Key of Life is imperfect but audacious. It was as if, at the ripe old age of 26, he was bored by the idea of just writing hit songs. .
Unfortunately, the album cover — featuring Wonder’s image sinking into a vortex of what resembles orange crepe paper — looks not only offhand but like a last-minute amateur effort; the effect is hideous and offensively cheap, considering the album’s $13.98 list price. The material itself varies so widely that even after weeks of listening it’s difficult to get a critical fix on. Stevie underlines this dismal writing with his rambling liner notes. It then stayed there for the rest of the year; to understand just how ubiquitous the music of the mid-’70s could be, consider that it knocked Frampton Comes Alive! The album’s opening lines—“Good morn or evening friends/Here’s your friendly announcer/I have serious news to pass on to everybody,” from the almost impossibly gorgeous “Love’s in Need of Love Today”—laid out the stakes for all that would follow. “ Songs in the Key of Life, ” he writes, “is only a conglomerate of thoughts in my subconscious that my Maker decided to give me the strength, the love+love-hate = love … Coolio, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and Will Smith sampled its hooks. Instead, though, in August of 1975, he signed a new contract with Motown—a seven-year, seven-album, $37 million agreement, the largest deal made with a recording star up to that point. What he can’t say in words he can say more fluidly, subtly and powerfully in his music.
Are we being given this heap of songs as a dog-biscuit reward for our patience or because Stevie had such a staggering amount of fine material that he wanted to release as much as possible? Motown flew press and everyone who had worked on the album to the Long View Farm studio in Massachusetts for the first playback and a battery of interviews with Wonder, presenting everybody with autographed copies of the album. After Songs in the Key of Life, though, something seemed to deflate in Stevie Wonder’s work. Though the first impulse is to begin editing it down, the more you listen, the less you want to cut.
Then there were the simple celebrations of love and faith—on “Isn’t She Lovely,” the magic of birth and family—emotions shared by all, but never to be taken for granted in undervalued Black lives. Songs in the Key of Life is the eighteenth album by American recording artist Stevie Wonder, released on September 28, 1976, by Motown Records. The album was more than just a masterpiece; it was the culmination of all of the potential that Stevie Wonder showed since his days as an 11-year-old prodigy. Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life, like some big Hollywood studio blockbuster, comes to us already weighted down with words, stabbed with exclamation points and wrapped — or is it shrouded? Karg’s clear, bright soprano is better suited to the more pictorial Wunderhorn settings than to some of the more inward-looking Rückert songs, but her singing is always acutely sensitive, and she ends the disc with a fascinating novelty, two songs in which she is “accompanied” by Mahler himself, as recorded on piano rolls in 1910 and complete with some occasionally startling tempo changes. Stevie Wonder was unable to control the springs of his creativity during that decade. The inclusion of four straggling cuts on a bonus EP comes across finally as a self-indulgent rather than generous gesture. If the lyrics are flawed and uneven, the productions are, without exception, excellent. There’s an easy familiarity about their Schubert performances, an almost private intimacy in which nothing is overstated, but the Beethoven cycle never quite catches fire; some distinctly slow tempi, especially in the first song, don’t help.
Wonder’s message songs have always been a bit heavy-handed, but “Black Man,” at 8:29 the album’s longest track, is one of his most effective. Almost everyone understood the magnitude of Wonder’s achievement, but there were some objections, mostly having to do with the length and sprawl of the record. The hat tip to Duke Ellington was significant, since in some ways Songs in the Key of Life most recalled that composer’s classic long-form works like “Black, Brown, and Beige” (or Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite or Charles Mingus’ “Pithecanthropus Erectus”) in its attempt to portray the complete sweep of the Black American experience. The shows were magnificent, the words as true as ever, and there was Stevie, still telling us—showing us—that “music is a world within itself/With a language we all understand.” Almost four decades later, you could feel it all over. “Isn’t She Lovely,” about Wonder’s baby girl Aisha, isn’t as substantial lyrically, but Stevie’s irrepressible fatherly joy sets the song aglow, finding its best expression in his sprightly harmonica playing.
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