Stevie Wonder’s Songs In The Key Of Life celebrates its 50th anniversary in late September, with Wonder announcing a tour to celebrate this milestone. The tour sold out in twenty minutes showcasing how gracefully Wonder’s magnum opus has aged over the past five decades.
Recorded over the course of two years in California and wielding an initial tracklist of seventeen songs, Wonder covers universal themes of compassion, racial inequality, and loss whilst retaining his traditional Motown-inspired, progressive soul soundscape. What I believe props this album head-and-shoulders above Wonder’s earlier, funkier projects such as Innervisions and Talking Book is the scale by which it was recorded, including all-star musicians such as Herbie Hancock and Minnie Riperton, as well as the grand orchestral feel that continues throughout the runtime. Songs In The Key Of Life never hesitates to flip songs upside-down with bright, colourful explosions of trumpet fanfare or jazzy saxophone passages, ensuring that there isn’t a dull moment whilst Wonder confidently flies from genre-to-genre with masterful precision and technical excellence.
The record is full of household classics, including ‘Sir Duke’, ‘Isn’t She Lovely’, and ‘As’ — one of the most poetic love songs to be written which crescendos suddenly into a soulful celebration of the meaning of love itself. A personal favourite is ‘Another Star’, an eight minute, Latin-inspired epic that flies round the room with bongo drums, jangly piano codas, and an enchantingly catchy choir providing backing vocals to Wonder’s powerhouse lyrics. These addictive instrumentals are littered all throughout the album, with ‘Summer Soft’ being a notable standout due to its gradual semi-tonal rise over four minutes. The payoff of Wonder hitting an outstandingly impressive high note whilst synths flitter up and down alongside flutes and crashing hi-hat cymbals. This album is really a celebration of life and, most importantly, the people who inhabit this world. ‘Black Man’, whilst primarily celebrating African-American culture, celebrates enthusiastically the achievements of all races and religions which contribute to America, narrated by a teacher and her class of schoolchildren.
Songs In The Key Of Life is playful, optimistic, and demonstrates the power of music in conveying not only social issues, but the solutions as well. Wonder’s album truly stands the test of time as one of the greatest albums ever composed, and this is evident in how much love the record has continued to receive since its’ creation.
Image by Unknown, Stevie Wonder playing the harmonica in the 1970s. This image is a crop of this: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Burt_Bacharach_-_jam_session.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stevie_Wonder_playing_harmonica.png
