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Classic Recordings: Stevie Wonder – Songs In The Key of Life

Twenty-one songs from the record that ended the greatest creative run in the history of popular music, and did it by refusing to be a single album.

Stevie Wonder saw the future……

Songs in the Key of Life (1976)

By 1976 Stevie Wonder had released Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions and Fulfillingness' First Finale in four years, winning Album of the Year three times. He then signed what was reported as the largest recording contract anyone had yet been given, and used it to make a double album with a bonus EP attached — a format the industry actively discouraged.

It entered the American chart at number one, which almost nothing did in 1976, and stayed there for months. More importantly, it is the record where Wonder stopped writing songs about his own interior life and started writing about everyone else's.

What to listen for

"Love's In Need Of Love Today" opens with nothing but voices, which is a statement of intent: this is an album that will spend two hours arguing for tenderness as a political position.

"Village Ghetto Land" sets a description of poverty against a synthesised string quartet, and the mismatch between the elegance of the setting and the brutality of the lyric is the entire point.

"Sir Duke" and "I Wish" are the joyful pair everyone knows — one a history lesson about Ellington and Basie, the other the best song ever written about being a badly behaved child.

"Pastime Paradise" is the strangest thing here: a track built on what sounds like an orchestra but is largely a synthesiser, with a gospel choir and Hare Krishna chanters both singing on it. Coolio rebuilt it twenty years later and it lost none of its menace.

"As" and "Another Star" are the long ones, and both earn their length — "As" in particular builds for seven minutes without repeating an idea.

"Knocks Me Off My Feet", "Joy Inside My Tears" and "Summer Soft" are where the serious listeners live.

"Contusion" is the fusion instrumental that reminds you he could out-play almost anyone, and "Isn't She Lovely" needs no introduction at all.

Go deeper

Innervisions (1973) is the tighter masterpiece if this one's sprawl defeats you. Talking Book (1972) is where the synthesiser work begins.

Wonder played the great majority of the instruments here himself, using the Moog and ARP systems built with Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff — a partnership that changed what a single musician could do in a studio.

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