Songs in the Key of Life

Tamla/Motown, 1976

months before the recording sessions for Songs in the Key of Life ended, the musicians in Stevie Wonder’s band had T-shirts made up that proclaimed we’re almost finished. It was the stock answer to Motown executives and everybody who had fallen in love with Wonder’s early Seventies albums and who had been waiting two years for the next chapter. “I believed there was a lot that needed to be said,” Wonder later recalled. More, in fact, than he could fit on a double album — also included was a bonus EP, a seven-inch single with four more songs from the sessions.

Songs, released in 1976, is the sound of the most effortlessly brilliant pop artist of his time pulling every mood and facet of life into his music — from the giddy joy of a baby in the bathtub (“Isn’t She Lovely,” featuring the cries and giggles of Wonder’s infant daughter Aisha Morris) to dismay about the indifference of the wealthy (“Village Ghetto Land”) and hope for a pan-African future (“Black Man”). Wonder pulled from every imaginable musical source — the ecstatic “Sir Duke” references Duke Elington and Ella Fitzgerald, while “As” featured Herbie Hancock on Fender Rhodes.

Because of his blindness, Wonder could record faster by memorizing lyrics, but some songs had four or five intricate verses, so somebody had to prompt him. Often it was engineer John Fischbach, reading lines into the headphone mix just seconds before Wonder would sing them. “He never got thrown off,” Fischbach told Rolling Stone years later. “His vocals had so much power.”