Events

[POP] While there have been numerous other so-called “important” double albums, Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life remains unmatched in both its musical and ideological scope. Yet it almost never happened. By the middle of 1975, Wonder was fed up with living in the United States and felt the country was in decline. He’d repeatedly expressed an interest in emigrating to Ghana where he planned to work with handicapped children—indefinitely. This was not intended as a temporary hiatus from recording, but rather a complete detachment from the music industry and an end to his recording career. A farewell concert event was apparently in the initial planning stages when he changed his mind.

He signed a new deal with Motown in August of 1975 for an unprecedented $37 million dollars that would cover seven albums in as many years. Songs in the Key of Life was the first of these. Wonder channeled his aggravation into making a funky masterpiece of socio-political import. The seven minute opener, “Love’s in Need of Love Today,” portrays a struggle between good and evil (in this case, love and hate) in the simplest terms, illustrating a growing lack of compassion between fellow men that he found troubling (and is perhaps at the root of all our conflicts). “Have a Talk with God” immediately follows, suggesting a spiritual coping mechanism that trumps all others.

From there, he tackles myriad issues: racism, poverty, social justice, spiritual bankruptcy, first love, lost love, fleeting love, childbirth/parenting and gender roles all figure their way in, while the soundtrack traverses the lines between soul, jazz, and funk. Magically, he also makes short detours into prog, fusion, world beat, and classical. Originally titled Let’s See Life How it Is, Wonder had established an ingenious contrast between song lyrics that discussed divisions and delineations, set against a musical landscape that unapologetically crisscrossed genres.

Somehow he did it all without giving in to schmaltz. Despite a certain hokey quality to “Isn’t She Lovely,” (which, by the way, was never officially released as a single despite having reached #23 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart), the sprawling set remains mostly serious in tone without ever seeming weighed down. 

Work on Songs in the Key of Life has already begun before Wonder renewed his contract; recording had commenced in 1974. The resulting 85-minute-and-21-second suite arrived on September 28, 1976, as an ambitious double LP set with an additional four track EP included—21 songs in all.

It’s largely considered the swan song of his most creatively fruitful period, which also includes Talking Book (1972), Innervisions (1973) and Fulfillingness’ First Finale (1974). Many fail to realize that Wonder had sustained a nasty car accident in 1973 that robbed him of his olfactory senses and also made him temporarily unable to taste anything in addition to his blindness. Some folks believe that these additional sensory deprivations, essentially rendering him a thinking pair of ears for a while, helped him perfect his craft during this creative 1970’s peak.

Whatever the case, Stevie Wonder’s own pride in this particular project led him to hold a listening party in Massachusetts at Long View Farms, to which he invited (and paid to transport) over 200 media personalities. That pride sustains, and is no doubt the fuel behind his current string of Songs in the Key of Life performance dates. The three-hour-plus show fully recreates the original album’s sequence with some extended jams—a  musical tour de force coming to the First Niagara Center on Thursday, November 19 that’ll truly make you weak and knock you off your feet.