Icon: Stevie Wonder

Being a 12-year-old genius has its downsides, and in Stevie Wonder's case it was following up 1963's fluke No. 1, "Fingertips Pt. 2." Possessing a wailing harmonica and a voice that wailed even louder and, it seemed at times, higher, Stevie startled adults with his capacity to pick up and utilize musical information — he could learn just about any instrument and had a unique ear for harmony. But it took a... while for that to become common knowledge. Meanwhile, out came the middling likes of "Hey Harmonica Man," appearing on middling albums like Stevie at the Beach.

By late 1965, Stevie Wonder was that wondrous modern thing: a teenager. So he co-wrote "Uptight (Everything's Alright)" with Henry Cosby and Sylvia Moy, putting it to a track that screamed his youth loudly and unabashedly. "Uptight" set a brassy new agenda, the horns punching like Ali and the guitars clanging like a casino. Working largely with producers Cosby, Moy and Clarence Paul (the latter chipping in occasionally on vocal harmonies and second leads, as on "Blowin' in the Wind"), Wonder began to find his legs artistically.

Up-Tight — no idea why they re-spelled it from the single — is a fairly typical mid-'60s Motown album, programmed at random and full of filler. Nevertheless, it's an intriguing look at the crossroads Stevie faced with the title track. The frenetic "Nothing's Too Good For My Baby" followed "Uptight" to the letter, only faster. "Contract on Love" is actually a 1962 single (it directly preceded "Fingertips Pt. 2"), and it's a strange contrast here — even among the comparatively raw approach of the bluesy "Teach Me Tonight," it sticks out. Wonder's music would later remain all-over-the-place, but here that's a distraction.

The late '60s found many of Motown's old guard beginning to stumble on the charts. James Brown and Sly & the Family Stone were redefining the ground under black music, the white rock establishment was turning into something far different from Motown's clean, lean, mean three-minute bursts, and Holland-Dozier-Holland's departure from the company by the end of 1967 deprived the label of its usual retinue of reliable hits. Aside from... the Jackson 5, whose late-1969 Motown debut didn't fully impact till 1970, the two consistent exceptions to the label's slide were Norman Whitfield, who funked up the Temptations and cut Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," and Stevie Wonder, who continued to come into his own as a writer and producer as well as being the most idiosyncratic of the classic Motown vocalists.

For Once in My Life, from 1968, collected four recent Stevie singles — the title track and "You Met Your Match" were both No. 2 R&B hits ("For Once" went No. 2 pop as well), the propulsive "Shoo-Be-Doo-Be-Doo-Da-Day" an R&B No. 1 that went Top 10 pop, and the smaller hit "I Don't Know Why I Love You" — as well as some of the better filler of the period. Stevie was plotting his own course by this point, and you can hear him stretch out on "I Don't Know Why I Love You," with its dramatic string and brass swoops, breathless and desperate vocal, and sitar-ish opening riff. But the off-cuts are worth attention too, even something like "Ain't No Lovin'," where lyrics as egregious as "I'll build a house of gingerbread someday/And bring the sugar cookie home to stay" are accompanied by a bright tune and an "Oh, my angel love/ Can't stop dreamin' of" that the Lo-Fidelity Allstars made fabulous use of on their "Feel What I Feel" in 2002.

How pronounced has Stevie Wonder's taste for sap been? This 1969 album is the one where he covers Tony Bennett's "The Shadow of Your Smile," so it goes at least back to then. There's also "Hey Young Lovers," a weird carnival-barker/old-man exhortation to "be brave, be faithful...you've got to cling to each other very close tonight/ I've been in love like you." (Stevie was all of 19 that year, so no,... probably not.) And of course there's the title track, the most unabashedly lovely of his pre-turning-21 material — limpid harmonica and pastel strings make the song Motown's truest hat-tip to the kind of stuff Burt Bacharach was producing in the mid-'60s. (In fact, if "My Cherie Amour" sounds a little out of time for 1969, that's because it was recorded three years earlier, and remixed slightly for issue.)

Someone at Motown had enough wit that the My Cherie Amour album consists entirely of songs about love. The Doors' "Light My Fire" is given fairly leaden strings and a big-band arrangement that turns it to schmaltz (well, OK, so was the Doors' original, but at least it was cutting-edge schmaltz) that nevertheless features some of Stevie's brightest harmonica playing. The hit "Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday" had gone around the Motown roster before Stevie turned it into a defining hit. And that Bennett cover? You know, not bad.

When he started out, Stevie Wonder's singing style was unique: a staccato stammer that erupted in high notes seemingly out of nowhere, unpredictable but assured. By 1970, he was a little more conventional, but still full of surprises. This lively album, much of it self-written and produced (but still within the Motown formula), is his best in his label's hits-and-filler mold, rather than in the woven-together fashion of his mid-'70s.

Motown's players tended... to get loose with Stevie — spontaneity was always part of his act, and on "Sugar" the session men play a convincing hard-rock groove that seems more off-the-cuff than usual. Wonder's version of the Beatles' "We Can Work It Out" is set to a bumpy funk groove based on a pulsing electric piano. "Signed, Sealed & Delivered" is one of his great show-stoppers, the Motown machine fully charged and plugged into Sly Stone — just as they are, only even more so, on the heavy stomping "You Can't Judge a Book by Its Cover." "Heaven Help Us All" is Stevie in preacher-philosopher-oracle mode — in short, this album contains just about everything that would catapult Stevie into the rock 'n' roll big leagues within a couple of years, and not even in all that embryonic a fashion. You can hear he's primed and ready to explore beyond a format he's already stretched to its limit.

With the exception of the Jackson 5, Stevie Wonder had been one of the few real bright spots for Motown in 1970 — not only on his own, with the superb Signed, Sealed & Delivered album, but as writer-producer of the Spinners' hit "It's a Shame." The next step was to take charge of his own music — and with Berry Gordy's go-ahead, that's what Stevie designed 1971's Where I'm Coming... From to demonstrate. Co-writing with his wife Syreeta Wright (who as Rita Wright had a 1968 Motown hit with "I Can't Give Back the Love I Feel for You"), Stevie made a real sleeper — it's been largely buried from memory by the truly original stuff that would follow, and as the stepping-stone between the fast-eroding Motown formula and what Stevie would cook up on his own (with banks of synthesizers), it's often fascinating.

Where I'm Coming From is the closest any classic Motown artist got in replicating the kind of albums that got played on free-form early FM rock radio. "I Wanna Talk to You" makes it clear that Stevie had been listening to Frank Zappa and the Bonzo Dog Band as well as the Beatles and the Who. Then a big band and schmaltz strings come in for "Take Up a Course in Happiness." Yet there's nothing slapdash about this range — Wonder is merely attempting to go all the way with the work he'd been doing up to this point. The masterpiece here is "Do Yourself a Favor," the hardest funk-rock he ever cut — and yes, that includes "Superstition," not to mention Funkadelic, whom Stevie was surely listening to, just as he was his fellow Motown funk master Norman Whitfield.

A month after the release of Where I'm Coming From in 1971, Stevie Wonder turned 21. Shortly thereafter, Berry Gordy received a letter from Wonder's lawyer, nullifying his client's contract — signed when Stevie was underage — with the label. Eventually, Wonder would have a new contract that allowed Stevie complete control over his albums, front to back. It was the best deal Gordy could have made: Stevie was, for the next... decade, Motown's bestselling artist.

Around the time his contract was being renegotiated, Wonder had met Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff, a pair of Englishmen who called themselves Tonto's Expanding Head Band, who helped him program the banks of Arp and Moog synthesizers that would become the bedrock of his next handful of albums. Music of My Mind isn't quite as polished as what would follow — Wonder is a little indulgent here, with most of the tracks stretching a bit too far: "Love Having You Around" and "Keep on Running" would both have been improved by being shortened, and the eight-minute, two-part "Superwoman" could have edited too, not least in its whiny lyrics. Nevertheless, while you can hear Wonder's command over synthesizers grow over the next albums, right from the start he's great at conjuring a mood from them: whirling and playful on "Love Having You Around," mixing them with an earthy harmonica on "Sweet Little Girl," funereal on the closing ballad "Evil."

Wonder was clearly onto something. During the summer that separated this album from his next one, Wonder went on tour, opening for the Rolling Stones, which would help propel him into the wider rock arena he was hoping to get to grips with. This is a major step in that direction.

The album that cemented Stevie Wonder as 100 percent his own artist, a bona-fide auteurist, studio-based rock star, starts out like cocktail hour. Smooth electric piano, supper-club vocals from Jim Gilstrap and Lani Groves on the two opening lines, and then in comes Stevie, exuberant as the teenager he'd only recently stopped being, throwing all kinds of things into the mix (oddly placed backing vocals and overdubbed vocal whimpering) that the Carpenters... weren't about to, no matter how at home Karen and Richard would be with "You Are the Sunshine of My Life." It was an instant standard that assured the folks who'd grown up with Stevie that he was ready to take on adulthood the way he'd taken on the role of Motown's in-house teenager.

Then, track by track, Talking Book ushered in the fully-fledged man Stevie had been aiming to become for a half-decade or so. Even on the Motown-sanctioned 12-song jobs with Wonder's name on them, he was more likely to throw a curveball than anyone else on the label, even in-house rebel Marvin Gaye, and both 1971's Where I'm Coming From and 1972's Music of My Mind are full of them. But on Talking Book the curves and the big, fat, down-the-middle fastballs are increasingly one and the same. The experiments that made Music not quite there yet had given way to an easy mastery with everything — groove, vocals, instrumental embellishment, and turning the utterly space-age and badass Arp and Moog synthesizers and, on the titanic "Superstition," the clavinet, into absolute musts for any forward-thinking R&B (or rock) artist.

"Superstition" is the legend here for good reason: Stevie is furious, mocking, snide and righteous. "When you believe in things that you don't understand, then you suffer," he wails; how much more is there to say? You can hear its roots as a track earmarked for Jeff Beck (who offers a beautifully restrained solo on "Lookin' for Another Pure Love"), but there's no question that it's Stevie's greatest record.

This record distilled a lot of things and made it look easy. "Maybe Your Baby" got gut-bubbling avant-blues into homes where Funkadelic was still feared to tread (and the nasal twittering vocals he overdubs onto its long coda presage Prince's "Camille" voice on Sign 'O' the Times). "Tuesday Heartbreak" is a delicious mixture of oddly staticky saxophone, the album's most potent wah-wah guitar licks, a wide-swaying and irresistible chorus, and an open-hi-hat drum pattern a half-step away from early disco. And the album ends on three ballads that build an arc. "Blame It on the Sun" faces the aftermath of a breakup with a soaring melody that probably made Elton John nervous. "Lookin' for Another Pure Love" cautiously plays the field after another split, over impossibly rich timbres. And "I Believe (When I Fall In Love It Will Be Forever)" finishes it out with a nervous but bold look into a bright future. How apt.

Early '70s protest soul had as much silliness and bandwagon jumping as any other musical era. But it can't be a coincidence that Stevie Wonder's greatest album is also his most deeply pessimistic — not only because there was so much to rail against in 1973, and that the government's and society's crimes against humanity had a special sting that would dissipate the more frequently they occurred (familiarity breeds disinterest at least... as much as contempt), but Stevie has always been at his sharpest when he has a direct target to aim for.

On Innervisions, Wonder took stock of the world around him and found a good deal of it wanting — yet he refused to give in to despair, even when sneering at drug abuse on "Too High," cutting a flim-flam man to pieces on "He's Misstra Know-It-All," or, most unforgettably, turning his voice to gravel to warn against damnation on "Living for the City." There's an inherent optimism that lights the darkest passages of this very dark album; that fits with Stevie the activist. But surely the amount of wrong to lament in the early '70s did its share to spur Wonder to his peak.

Rather than a soothing, instantly iconic rolling electric-keyboard melody of the sort that opened Talking Book ("You Are the Sunshine of My Life"), "Too High" worms in at a daunting angle, heavily informed by jazz (Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters was released only two months after Innervisions) as well as funk, and sounds as slippery as the song's subject. The falsetto doo-doo-doo refrain is a little shticky the first time it appears and mournful the last, after the woman who lets drugs take her life over dies: "What did her friends say?/ They said she's too high." "Misstra Know-It-All" and parts of "Jesus Children of America" dig at false preachers. "Living For the City" ends on a sermon. Stevie was a scold, all right, but he picked his targets perfectly.

The mammoth Songs in the Key of Life is rightly seen as Wonder's I-can-do-it-all culmination, but Innervisions ranges more confidently across nearly as much terrain. "Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing" goes to Cuba and brings back a great spoken intro: "I speak very, very, um, fluent Spanish." "Visions" is a spiderweb of guitars (and Stevie's Fender Rhodes) that could have been on any number of the period's folk albums. The moony synths of "Golden Lady" turned prog heads around; "All in Love Is Fair" will surely end the first act when Broadway finally gets around to a Stevie jukebox musical (step on it).

And "Higher Ground" is classic rock, flat out: the rhythm swinging and jittery, pounded along by Wonder's sinewy drumming, the twining synthesizers and clavinet tangling like guitars, and Stevie at his most call-the-troops. It's like a totally sober version of John Lennon in "Tomorrow Never Knows": "Believers, keep on believing/ Sleepers, just stop sleeping." Yet listen close to the song's fade-out. There's an ad-lib, just barely audible: "Don't you let nobody bring you down — and they'll sho' nuff try." Brrr.

Fullfillingness' First Finale was released in July 1974. The previous August, three days after Innervisions' release, the car Stevie was asleep and riding shotgun in rear-ended a truck, its bed going through the car's windshield, leaving the singer in a coma for four days and impairing his sense of smell. He was lucky to be alive, and while much of the music of the four albums Wonder issued between 1972 and 1974... were prepared during marathon sessions with synth programmers Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff, there was a marked turn inward on FFF from the widescreen social and political agenda of Innervisions.

The mood on FFF is largely light, though it has its moments, particularly "They Won't Go When I Go" (which grew a lot more ponderous when George Michael put it on 1990's Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1). Wonder once referred to FFF in an interview as "the sex album." Certainly that's what "Boogie on Reggae Woman," one of the album's two huge highlights and hit singles, is all about — it doesn't concern itself with Jamaican music at all. The lyrics are entirely about what Stevie would like to do with the woman — boogieing on in every way possible: "I'd like to see you in the raw under the stars above" — and the music dances around the beat rather than metronomically (and hypnotically), crushing the downbeat and tickling the up. "You Haven't Done Nothin'," a swipe at Nixon, opens with theme-music synth entrails before the beat swamps in and claims the track. The Jackson 5 sing background, mostly as an excuse for Stevie to drop their names. Cute.

From a much later vantage, it's clear that the track here with the longest-lasting value has been the ballad "Creepin'," which is basically Stevie on all instruments with a backing-vocal assist from Minnie Riperton. The Moogs undulate smoothly; the track was among those that necessitated the formation of what became Quiet Storm radio, and as Stevie's most quietly masterful slow jam it's grown in iconicity thanks to Luther Vandross's version of it on 1985's The Night I Fell in Love. No wonder this is the sex album.

One of my earliest (hazy) memories is of being very small and knowing that this album was what everybody was listening to. Songs in the Key of Life was a real-time cultural event, the ultimate proof in that Bicentennial year that America could do it all, and so could its most beloved popular musician. What's remarkable is how well it's held up, given that the thing really is excessive. It's not simply... a double-LP, but a double-LP with a bonus EP — and guess what usually goes first when people make their own condensed versions?

Just kidding: I don't know anybody who condenses this thing. Stevie Wonder wanted you to take all of him, and if that meant some of his most mooning ballads, real gunk like the friggin' endless "Joy Inside My Tears" or "Saturn," sci-fi humanism with a synth riff that's this close to Europe's "The Final Countdown," so be it. This is R&B's Thanksgiving dinner.

One of the best things about Songs is how carefully it's put together. The first five songs (Side A on vinyl) are particularly well chosen. The preacherly benediction "Love's in Need of Love Today" moves easily into the murmured "Have a Talk with God," then to the ominous synth-strings and stark vocal "Village Ghetto Land," only to lift us over left with the instrumental jazz-funk jam "Contusion" and then something older-fashioned but still jazzy, "Sir Duke." Even with "Sir Duke" a hit single, the sequencing is so impeccable you start to wonder if these songs weren't written to fit the overarching structure Wonder had in mind, rather than patched together in a way that made sense.

The albums proper (leaving the EP aside) ended big, too. Side D started flimsy, a harp trifle (with Dorothy Ashby) called "If It's Magic," but then "As" came up, and everything else seemed like a warm-up. On an epic paean to melody, this tune was juiciest, unfurling with easy conviction and answered by background vocals by Wonder and Mary Lee Whitney doing a damn good impersonation of a gospel quartet, as well as one of the great drumming performances of the '70s, by Greg Brown — as loose and full of personality as Stevie's own drumming. Wonder turns his voice to grit, a la "Living for the City," but here it amps the romantic, socially conscious, and party aspects of the track all at once. When he comes back in his natural voice — "I-I-I'll be loving you!" — the handoff is so deft you'd imagine they were two people on one stage. "Another Star" follows, a badass eight-and-a-half-minute Brazilian-inflected stomp that kept the era's disco DJs fed for months.

No matter how many synthesizers he used, Stevie Wonder's '70s music was carried along on a pulse provided by the man himself, not a machine. Wonder is one of the most original drummers in R&B. Not as an adjunct to his real work as a singer or performer; as a drummer, point blank. To hear him compressed to hell, all the character taken out of his style, when not replaced entirely by... drum machines, all thanks to the dictates of commerce, is sad, and they're where In Square Circle's annoyingly perky qualities inhere.

The electro-shakers on "Part-Time Lover" are playing 32nd notes, right? Just checking. Either way, they're fast, and they typify the anxious tension and sheen this album carries in spades. Everything had to sound ready for MTV — to sound tinny and compressed because it was going to be heard coming through TV speakers — and "Part-Time Lover," Wonder's last No. 1 pop hit, typified this trend. The homogenously milky sound of the album smothers what sound like they might have been a fun bunch of songs once. The best thing to say about In Square Circle is that 1985 was a terrible year for a lot of other musicians too.

This was treated as a major comeback upon its 1987 release, and there are audible reasons why, even decades on. The sound has the boxy slickness that befouls so much mid '80s music, but its aridity can't conceal a thoughtful group of songs — and in truth, the digital arrangements have a suppleness that's streets away from the square flatness of '85's In Square Circle. By now Stevie was competing with more... angular Jam & Lewis and Prince synth-funk, and here he keeps up surprisingly well. (Another rival: Michael Jackson, who makes a welcome appearance co-singing "Get It.") Even when it doesn't quite work, it's fascinating, as with "In Your Corner," which adds a busy, plinky synth burble to a song so jumpy he could have cut it as a teenager, or "Galaxy Paradise," which marries Stevie's longstanding sci-fi fixation to something Teddy Riley wouldn't have minded coming up with. "Skeletons," a big R&B hit and a minor pop one, was Stevie at his scolding-the-politicians best, thanks in part to a big, authoritative synth-bass line, not unlike the same year's "Sign 'O' the Times," by Stevie's great inheritor Prince. But the forgotten classic is "Dark 'n' Lovely." Its fuzzy keyboards, busy low end, and bustling tempo make it prime bait for latter-day disco lovers looking for new grist for the DJ mill.

Stevie Wonder had spent plenty of 1987's Characters grappling with the grooves Prince and Jam-Lewis had brought to the table. The same year, the term "new jack swing" was coined by the Village Voice's Barry Michael Cooper, and that style was closer to the heart of what Stevie's next album would tackle. Wonder had been working on what would end up becoming 1995's Conversation Peace when Spike Lee asked him to... do the music of his fifth film, about interracial relationships, and it seems like the relatively truncated time he spent working on it was a tonic. The Jungle Fever soundtrack was clearly touched by the post-Teddy Riley brigade: The pitch-bent synth whines and clipped backing vocals of "Queen in the Black" are clearly in Guy's debt, just like Guy's Aaron Hall swiped two-thirds of his phrasing, minimum, from classic Stevie ballads like "Lately." Needless to say, Stevie sounds right at home in these grooves — in particular, the title track, with a rubber-band bass line and orchestral hits that make it one of the most great new jack swing tracks, period. The chorus: "She's gone black-boy hazy/ I've gone white-girl crazy/ Ain't no thinkin' maybe/ We're in love." It's sardonic, of course — Stevie's sardonic. But he sounds like he wishes them well anyway.

Four years on from the Jungle Fever soundtrack, eight from Characters, Stevie Wonder still sounded comfortable inside the ultra-modern R&B he'd helped invent, but inspiration had run short. Conversation Peace was advertised as a major event at the time — there was no question of his impact on everything from R&B harmony groups like Jodeci and Blackstreet to the synth fantasias of latter-day techno. Much of the album is overworked and... has almost no presence: Listening, it becomes apparent that the album took so long to make because Wonder didn't trust himself enough to let the material breathe, and smoothed it over so obsessively it lost its shape. But oddly, the album comes alive in the middle. "Treat Myself" has the kind of compositional touches of Wonder's vintage material — a big sing-along chorus given an odd cast by an unexpected chordal jump at the end, a pair of brief but feelingful (and instantly recognizable) harmonica solos. "Tomorrow Robins Will Sing" is instantly likeable: a sprightly programmed rhythm and bass line with rumbling organ that sounds like something you'd be lucky to stumble onto during Sunday-morning gospel radio; Wonder's voice has an appealing rawness here. Ditto "For Your Love": less than nothing as a lyric, but he throws himself into it so fully it's startling. The rest isn't much, but it's livelier than the first half.

Released a full decade on from his previous studio album, 2005's A Time to Love is primarily distinguishable from Conversation Peace two ways. One, it's even more unabashed: You think Stevie only writes Hallmark cards? Well, is he ever going to write Hallmark cards! The other is that he's committed to the material in a way that (sometimes, not always) transforms it. The best track is called "Positivity"; it's the card you... give your friend who's going through a rough patch, with a long handwritten note about how seriously awesome she is. The lyrics here are just about what you figure; the man could give seminars. But if Wonder's major inventions are finished, his minor ones can delight, and here he finds a way to semi-rap without sounding like he's trying to be down with the kids or anything; he's just being Stevie in a different way. The loud electro-snare helps a lot, too — and that's him being arrested in the early '90s, sonically. But yeah: mostly ballads, sometimes good ones, yet there's little drive behind them. You can't hate a man for being content. Whether you want to listen is another question.