Some of the tracks do stand out a little more than the others. The opening "Fingertips" would later become Stevie's first major hit (based on live performance, mentioned later), and the mix of guitar, flute, and Stevie's bongos makes it a lively way to spend three minutes. "Manhattan at Six" features Stevie on drums, and he shows that he's already quite adept around the kit, giving a spark to what's otherwise moderately forgettable. And then there's "Some Other Time," a slow number that gives Stevie a chance at showing his harmonica skills over slower numbers, and while the song isn't especially notable when Stevie isn't featured, it does enough to earn its keep on the whole.

The rest is ... ehn ... I mean, it's fine as background music, and it's far from the worst of the early albums associated with Stevie, but I can't envision the scenario where I'd go out of my way to listen to it again. The two tracks with Stevie given co-credits are hardly anything special; "Wondering" has him doing some goofy things on a very 60s organ, and "Session Number 112" gives Stevie a chance to show off his still developing (but already decent) jazz piano skills, but you would never know that the person associated with them would eventually go down in history as a major genius.

So ok, it's not much of an album. Then again, he was 12 when this came out! It's not as if it's Stevie's fault that most of this album is just decent background, and Stevie's certainly responsible for the better portions as much as anybody is. You can do much worse with early Stevie, for sure.

Here's the problem, though: this material sounds ridiculous when sung by somebody who hasn't reached puberty yet, even if it's sung by a very talented young man who hasn't reached puberty yet. There's no pathos, no angst, no sexual tension, none of the aspects that don't seem especially shocking now but that had helped establish Ray Charles as a major figure in popular music by the time Stevie Wonder came along. Every one of the Ray Charles songs sounds fine when performed by Ray Charles (and the other Motown covers sound fine when covered by older people), and every one of these songs, the highly professional and tight playing of the backing musicians covering the material notwithstanding, sounds silly as soon as Stevie tries to do karaoke as best as he can.

There's really no point in delving into the album with any more detail than that; every single song here could be described in an almost identical way, as material I would have enjoyed more with pretty much any moderately talented adult Motown professional on vocals instead of Stevie. I give it as high of a grade as I do because I like all of the songs here at their cores, but as presented, they constitute novelty music.

Unfortunately, the rest of the album is much less exciting, and it falls more into the mold of what his handlers were trying to make him into rather than what best suited his strengths. The first side has a version of "Soul Bongo" (one of the average tracks from the debut, with Stevie on bongos) and a new song called "La La La La La," which is Stevie leading a call and response (singing while playing drums) over a pretty standard set of early 60s Motown licks. And the second half, well, that's all versions of songs from Tribute to Uncle Ray, and while I guess they don't sound any worse here than in studio (and it's especially impressive that Stevie sounds no worse live than in studio), these are still songs that don't really fit him at all.

This is probably too high of a grade for the album, given that it's 23 minutes and most of it just makes me shrug, but hot damn that first 6:40 is so great that I'm going to overreact a bit. If you're interested in the earliest days of Stevie Wonder's career, this is the best place to start.

I admit that I feel somewhat bad pretty much completely dismissing this album out of hand. Almost everything about it sounds extremely professional, and the arranger (Ernie Wilkins) certainly does a completely reasonable job given the standard expectations of what an album of this ilk should sound like. And yet, I simply don't understand why anyone but the most rabid Stevie Wonder historian would ever want to listen to this album. Stevie keeps the album from reaching anywhere near its full potential, and this kind of material, even at this point, was keeping Stevie from reaching his full potential. At best this is worth one listen.

The second major problem was the onset of puberty. Stevie recorded this at age 13, and while his voice hadn't fully changed into its adult version quite yet, it's clear that his Little Stevie Wonder voice was on its last legs. There are a couple of places where his voice clearly cracks, but more generally, his voice is clearly in an awkward transition phase, and there are times (such as "Castles in the Sand") when he sounds like an adult woman trying to force her voice into an alto range when it doesn't belong there. The producers themselves clearly figured this out during the recording sessions, because clear steps are taken to limit the exposure of Stevie's voice; not only is his voice often surrounded in echo or otherwise obsfuscated by the instrumentation, but the album also contains four instrumentals. Yes, The Jazz Soul of Little Stevie was entirely instrumental, but it was also designed to introduce the world to Little Stevie Wonder and his many talents, whereas the presence of so many instrumentals on this album clearly serves the purpose of hiding him as much as possible.

So ok, this album sucks in broad strokes, but I still don't dislike it quite as much as I do With a Song in My Heart. Having four instrumentals on side 1 is silly, but I kinda enjoy listening to them; Stevie's harmonica largely makes up for the absence of his voice, and as much as they fall into the category of background music, they at least work as pleasant background music. Plus, as much as the opening "Castles in the Sand" isn't an especially good song, I do like the idea of ending the first side with an instrumental version of the same, helping to give the first side a sense of cohesion it might otherwise lack. On the second side, the failed single "Hey Harmonica Man" is an embarassing inclusion to his early career in much the same way "The Laughing Gnome" is an embarassment to early David Bowie, and "Beachstomp" is a sad example of the mid-60s "futile attempt to create a new dance by mentioning it in a song" genre, but the other three on the side are ok. The closing cover of "Beyond the Sea" is better than any of the covers on With a Song in My Heart by a good distance, and the first two songs of the side, "Happy Street" and "The Party at the Beach House," are just fun short up-tempo rave-up songs with nothing to do with surfing (except for having the house in the latter be a beach house, even though it could easily just be your friend's house down the block) but that let Stevie display his main singing and playing strengths at the time.

I would never recommend this album, of course, and I can absolutely understand why Stevie would have such bad memories of this era, but I would also temper expectations of thinking this is somehow a bad album of the so-bad-it-has-to-be-heard variety. This is a misfire, yes, and the end of the Little Stevie Wonder era couldn't come too soon, but it's absolutely not a catastrophe.

This emergence of Stevie as somebody worth paying attention to, alas, makes the way he's deployed on this album and the next few rather frustrating. For one thing, the album contains three songs recorded in Stevie's earlier era, and while I like "Pretty Little Angel" (a brisk number with lush orchestration), "Music Talk" (which Stevie helped write) is pretty stiff and lumbering despite everyone's attempts (especially the horns) to liven it up, and "Contract on Love" just sounds embarassing on an album with some of the classics elsewhere. Also, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the "Blowin' in the Wind" cover, which was a major hit (and designed to bring Stevie recognition among people who didn't typically buy Motown-related music) but sounds silly in such a big arrangement (and the backing vocals from Pat Lewis, here and elsewhere on the album, annoy me in a bit). Then again, it's not really worse than, for instance, the silly cover of the song that The Hollies did a few years later, and I like that one more than I should, so it's hard for me to muster much spite for this one. And finally, even if it does have some contributions from The Four Tops, it's hard for me to get across the rather pedestrian cover of the old standard "Teach Me Tonight," which ultimately passes me by with little impression.

The rest of the album is pretty great, though still a little inconsistent. The two biggest hits (outside the "Blowin' in the Wind" cover), and the two best songs, are "Nothing's Too Good for My Baby" and "Uptight (Everything's Alright)" (both of which have Stevie co-credits), and while they're a little similar to each other (they're both based around an insistent steady beat and feature riveting horn parts), they each have enough personality and excitement that I'm not going to dismiss them based on that (though Stevie was pretty irritated that he was pushed into recording and releasing two songs this similar to each other in short order). "Nothing's Too Good for My Baby" is the blazing fast one, with Stevie roaring out his lines like he'd been doing this for 15 years, while "Uptight" is more mid-tempo, featuring a strong bassline and a smoother, poppier vocal melody and delivery to match. The album also gets off to a strong start with "Love a Go Go," another horn-driven number that prominently features Stevie's voice right away (the parts where the instrumentation emphatically stops to let Stevie sing solo, as if everyone involved wanted to show him off as much as possible here, are a real treat), and the ballad "Hold Me" shows that he already had dexterity in singing gentler numbers (the interplay between him and his female backing vocalists in the "I'll never never let you go" part is just lovely).

On the second side, "Asking for Trouble" (another one with a Wonder co-credit) just kinda comes and goes, and while "I Want My Baby Back" has a strong bass part, an amusingly lustful delivery, and a fun chorus hook where Stevie briefly goes into falsetto, I still always feel like it's missing something. After the trio of "Pretty Little Angel," "Music Talk," and "Contract on Love," which make the album seem like it's letting down pretty hard, though, the album comes to a rousing conclusion with the orchestrated ballad "With a Child's Heart," which probably would have irritated me tremendously had it been recorded for With a Song in My Heart (it's very much in a similar vein to the material on there), but here sounds fine thanks to the combination of Stevie's mature voice and his harmonica parts.

So ok, this album shows he still had a long way to go before he reached his full potential, but this actually sounds like the debut album of somebody with the potential to do great things, and I'm happy to treat it as such. At the very least, seek out the big hits, but some of the lesser known stuff is worthy of a listen as well.

All of the rest is ... fine, I guess. People often refer to "the Motown machine," in general and in specific reference to Stevie's teenage career, and if you ever wonder what exactly that means, this album is a great example. I mean, what's the point of having a 2-minute cover of the Byrds version of "Mr. Tambourine Man" that sounds exactly like their cover, just done by Stevie Wonder? Why did he need to cover "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)" within months of Cher making it a major hit? Why is there a cover of "Sixteen Tons" on here? I'll tell you why: because people running Motown knew people liked those songs, and they wanted cheap easy wins on albums they released and they wanted them as fast as possible. Mind you, I don't actively dislike these covers (and I confess to enjoying the ridiculous melodrama of "Bang Bang" quite a bit), but I can say that, if I was shuffling my iPod and one of them came up, my main reaction would be disappointment that I wasn't listening to another Stevie Wonder song instead.

Of the rest, "Thank You Love" has a bouncy guitar line that lifts it above the level of a pedestrian shuffle, "Sylvia" is a mid-tempo ballad with mandolin and a passionate vocal and little else, "My World is Empty Without You" is fine but sounded better as a Supremes song (maybe the production is better here but I'd rather listen to Diana Ross sing this any day), and "The Lonesome Road" is another decent but draggy number with too much time on the boring backing vocalist. And that's it! That's not a lot! Give the best handful of songs some listens, but the rest was never intended to have staying power, and they should be treated accordingly.

Of course, by making a major smash hit single, this means he had to get out an album to support it as fast as possible, one way or another, and this album milks the cliche "hit single + a bunch of covers" formula to a pretty ridiculous degree. This time the choices aren't even that clever or obscure: among other things, this album has covers of "Send Me Some Lovin'," "Respect," "My Girl," "Baby Don't You Do It," "A Fool for You," "Can I get a Witness," "I Pity the Fool," and "Please, Please, Please," and none of them are especially superior to more famous versions. And yet, I don't especially mind the covers here: in each case where Stevie takes on an especially famous number, he finds a way to make his own performing style come through in force, yet he also finds a way to blend that style with the source material, and I admire the effort in each case. Plus, well, it's nice to finally have a Ray Charles cover ("A Fool for You") from Stevie where his voice is mature enough for the effort not to sound ridiculous.

The album only has three other originals, but they're pretty good on the whole. "I'd Cry" is an up-tempo anthem with lots of horn and strings (and bland backing vocals), and while it doesn't have any instantly memorable melody parts, the passion of Stevie's delivery is infectious. "Everybody Needs Somebody (I Need You)" has an amusing recurring horn part, and the rest of the song isn't amazing, it's bouncy and energetic in a way that makes me enjoy it without effort when on. And finally, the closing "Every Time I See You I Go Wild" has a fascinatingly exotic and primal vibe to it, with a great simple guitar line and backing vocals that almost sound like something from a ritual chant, and this is the first time that a Stevie vocal delivery really conveys barely restrained sexual lust (which a 17-year-old Stevie Wonder reasonably would have been feeling pretty much constantly).

No, this isn't an especially great album, and it pales to what he'd be doing in a few years, but this is the first Stevie Wonder album that never shoots itself in the foot and that feels solidly competent at every level, not only in terms of performances but in terms of things like "what material should even be included." If you're looking for an enjoyable 30 minutes of Motown, you could do a lot worse than this.

The album also contains a version of "Ave Maria," and it actually sounds pretty great. Stevie is fully up to the task, with enunciation that doesn't sound terrible and with sufficient reverence in the delivery without sucking out the entertainment value, and the harmonica break in the middle fits in perfectly. It definitely lends an air of class to the album that many Christmas albums lack.

Still, I don't want to go too far. I can't ever anticipate thinking about listening to this any time other than at Christmas, and the chances that I would ever go out of my way to remember to pull this out at Christmas are slim, so there's an excellent chance I will listen to this no more than twice in the rest of my life. Still, it's not horrible, and if you're somebody who goes out of their way to pick up Christmas albums, I'd have to say that I've heard much worse.

Roughly speaking, this album strikes me as a cross between The Jazz Soul of Little Stevie and With a Song in My Heart, and that's definitely not an ideal comparison, especially at this point in Stevie's career. Stevie's harmonica is undoubtedly the featured star, but the bulk of the sound comes from fairly generic orchestration, over which Stevie essentially does harmonica karaoke. Over half of the album is covers in this vein, and they're ... ehn ... fine, I guess. I'm not really a fan of the cover of the standard "Ruby" that lasts almost 7 minutes (that's way too much goopy sentimentality in one sitting), and the two Burt Bacharach covers ("Alfie," "A House is Not a Home") don't especially thrill me, but the other ones, which are covers of contemporary hit singles, are pretty lovely (the medley of "Never My Love" and "Ask the Lonely" that close side 1, the cover of "Grazin' in the Grass" that close side 2). The originals (three of which have sole credits for Stevie), then, are where the album really shines, highlighting the range of expression Stevie could wrangle out of his harmonica playing and from other instruments. My favorite of the lot is "How Can You Believe," centered around a harmonica line that evokes an interesting blend of lust and nervous angst, but I'm also quite fond of "Bye Bye World," where Stevie's clavinet playing (this album marks the first appearance of one of Stevie's most important instruments) shows tremendous warmth and gives a strong glimpse of the kinds of music he'd start consistently writing in the next few years. The other two ("More Than a Dream" and "Which Way the Wind") are a slight step down, but I wouldn't mind hearing them from time to time.

On the whole, this isn't a bad album, but it's not a good album either, though I'd probably rate it a little higher if "Ruby" lasted half as long. This is an interesting curiosity, and the originals are definitely worth keeping, but otherwise this is only for hardcore fans.

The first half of the album is very strong, featuring three hit singles, a fourth single that should have been a hit, and two solid non-singles. The title track had originally been a slow ballad when recorded by acts like The Temptations or Tony Bennett, and this resulted in Wonder's version (a happy, cheerful, upbeat number) getting shelved initially, but common sense eventually prevailed, and this became a massive hit and one of his live calling cards. "Shoo-Be-Do-Be-Doo-Da-Day" is a fascinating ball of contradictory tension, with the instrumental parts (highlighted by Stevie on clavinet, but featuring great backing from The Funk Brothers) suggesting a dark intense funk number, but the lyrics suggesting a lighthearted happy pop number (the title practically sounds like something from a Disney film), and this tension works very much to the song's benefit. "You Met Your Match" was a little less popular overall but did quite well on the R&B charts, and while it's a slight step down from the previous two tracks, it's still a decent pop-funk number with its own share of great basslines and clavinet. Closing out the side is the glorious "I Don't Know Why," the failed single of the lot, built around descending bass and clavinet lines that sound not unlike "Gimme Shelter" from a couple of years hence (the Stones did a terrific cover of this one, found on the early rarities compilation Metamorphosis), and the cross of lustful danger (provided both by the instruments and by Stevie's voice) and the typical happy upbeat aspects of the rest of the album (provided by the backing horns and by Stevie's voice) make this a major highlight of the period.

The first half is rounded out by "I Wanna Make Her Love Me," another solid up-tempo clavinet-driven song dripping with lust-disguised-as-love, and "I'm More Than Happy (I'm Satisfied)," a gentler, more conventional Motown number full of bongos and happy harmonica. The second half, then, doesn't have any highlights on the level of the best parts of the first half, but it doesn't especially let the album down either. The cover of "Sunny" (written a couple of years before this album and made famous by Bobby Hebb and then by Cher) is melodramatic in a way that can't help but remind me of "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)" from a couple of years earlier (also covered by Cher), and which isn't the best thing in the world, but I get enjoyment from it in much the same way. "God Bless the Child" is a cover of an old Billie Holiday standard, and it fits Stevie's strengths well, especially when Stevie sings the "God bless the child who's got his own" line. The last cover (and the album closer) is "The House On the Hill," a number that relies much more on groove and the personality of the singer than on any sort of cohesive melody, but the song does a great job with both, and it works terrifically as a closer. As for the originals, the best is "I'd be a Fool Right Now," which sounds like the Stevie of Songs in the Key of Life transported back into his younger Motown days, providing a moderately conventional Motown up-tempo pop-ballad with a cornucopia of joy. "Ain't No Lovin'" and "Do I Love Her" are similarly ebullient, full of starry-eyed joy and love of life.

Maybe Stevie wasn't quite ready, in terms of effortless melodic genius and skilled craft in putting together arrangements, to make the kind of album that would lift him into superstardom in a few years, but while this album is still a little too lightweight to make it into his upper tier, it's absolutely the best one he'd made to this point. 60s Stevie is best consumed as a singles artist, but if you're determined to have one full album of his from his teenage years, this is absolutely the one to get.

The next few songs are enjoyable in their own way, but graceful and tasteful they are not. These tracks take the happy up-beat peppiness that had characterized some of the better moments of For Once In My Life and turn it up to 11, and the result is track after track that is full of giddiness whether or not the material actually calls for it. On an individual basis, I find this pretty fun: the transformations of "Hello Young Lovers" (a number originally from The King and I), "At Last" (an old jazz standard that one will typically hear in a slower, more contemplative manner) and "Light My Fire" (yup, the Doors song) into huge (both in sound and emotions) bombastic orchestral numbers makes for a delightful 10 minutes or so (and less if you only listen to the tracks individually), but the joke starts to wear thin thereafter. "The Shadow of Your Smile" at least somewhat varies things by going for a melancholy approach to Big Feelings, but "You And Me" and "Pearl" immediately shift things back to the happy side of Big Feelings, and by the time this stretch is over I'm not especially thrilled.

At least the next few songs, starting with two covers and ending with three originals, sound like they belong to an album that was conceived as an album rather than as a dumping ground of songs. "Somebody Knows, Somebody Cares" is a somewhat pedestrian mid-tempo horn-driven soul thumper, but it's a welcome oasis after the emotional excess of the previous songs, and it also serves to make the following "Yester-Me, Yester-You," a somewhat sappy ballad (that had been recorded a couple of years earlier) that's nonetheless memorable in the right ways to earn its keep, less of a slog to get through than it might otherwise be.

Of the three originals that end the album, the worst is "Give Your Love," but that's mainly because of the ridiculous spoken parts over piano; the song itself is overblown, but Stevie's vocal delivery is strong enough to ride the waves of orchestration without getting swallowed up by them, and the song ends up being a keeper despite its flaws. "Angie Girl" is better, largely sounding like a cross between the standard orchestrated Motown ballads Stevie had done so many of in the past and the more subtle ballads he'd make so many of in a few years, and the closing "I've Got You" is absolutely charming, largely because of the goofy woodwind-centric arrangement in the introduction and chorus (with a more standard arrangement in the verses), and it's so different from the bulk of the album that I find it rather cheeky to end with it.

On the whole, I enjoy this album significantly more than not, but I also recognize that I enjoy it for reasons in the vein of irony or unintentional comedy, and that's not typically something I look for with Stevie Wonder albums. Quite honestly, I genuinely don't even know whether or not I would recommend this to somebody who thinks they might be a serious Stevie Wonder fan; this could certainly end up as an album that a hardcore fan would like as an underrated jewel, sure, but it could also be a fan that a hardcore fan would reject as a major mistake (what with things like the "Light My Fire" cover) that should be brushed aside and never spoken of again. Give it a listen, but tread carefully.

On the other hand, while it wouldn't have been obvious at the time that this was the last album Stevie would make in the mold and that changes were coming, there are all sorts of interesting details that make it clear that Stevie was making major advances as a singer (his vocals on this album are far stronger than the already strong foundation he had established for himself in the late 60s) songwriter, arranger, and producer beyond his work in the 60s. "You Can't Judge a Book by its Cover," for instance, not only lays down a strong funk groove in the bass and drums (with great singing and some great horns on top), but also features that single shiny guitar chord that pops up over and over again as part of the groove; it helps give the song a locked-in feel that was far more typical of Sly and the Family Stone than of Stevie to this point, and it's pretty nice as far as "lesser" Stevie Wonder tracks go (the cover "Joy" (Takes Over Me)" is another high-quality funk pounder, with a weirdly off-kilter delivery of "Joy!" in the backing vocals, that deserves a brief mention). "I Can't Let My Heaven Walk Away" is another one I find fascinating, not because of anything particular in the arrangement, but because of the deeply impassioned vocals that stand out even by the standards of young Stevie, especially whenever he sings the title. Elsewhere, "Sugar," "Anything You Want Me to Do," "I Gotta Have a Song," and the closing "Something to Say" are all originals (with co-credits, of course) that superficially have a lot in common with a lot of the lesser material Stevie had recorded in previous years but that have features in their melodies that will sound pretty familiar to somebody who knows his classic material pretty well. "I Gotta Have a Song" stands out to me most in this regard, with the way that it builds from a number teeming with delicate grace into a bigger anthem that hints at typical Motown features but never fully becomes a standard Motown number.

Of course, it's not the songs above (which, even if they're all pretty nice deep cuts, are still deep cuts) that bring this album up to a level as high as this, but instead it's the four singles that start off the album, which range from "pretty good" to "among the best things Stevie ever did." The opening "Never Had a Dream Come True" would be notable if only for that gentle rising "Doo doo doo ..." that kicks off the song and reappears periodically, and the guitar and strings and bass mix together in a very tasteful way that once again sounds like regular Motown but somehow goes beyond it. Last in the group (both sequentially and in quality) is "Heaven Help Us All," a cover, and while it's not one of Stevie's better gentle songs (even narrowing down to his pre-classic era), the mix of his vocals with the backing choir manages to sound nice without sounding at all tacky, and had it been on My Cherie Amour it would have been one of the better numbers. The major highlights, then, are first his cover of "We Can Work it Out" and then the title track. "We Can Work it Out" is still thoroughly recognizable as a cover of the original, of course, but while the melody is preserved (apart from some phrasing tweaks here and there), the vibe is completely transformed. What was once an elite gentle pop-rock song, featuring a harmonium, now becomes a clavinet-driven funk/soul standard, with great bass and amazing backing vocals and a harmonica solo that feels like it should have been in the original. And the title track, well, it features one of the most effortlessly memorable choruses Stevie ever wrote (and verses that feel like they couldn't resolve in any other possible way), and Stevie's vocal scatting in the second half over the horns and bass and drums is just spectacular.

The grade here is somewhat borderline, but it's deserved nonetheless, and it shows that, even in the tight constraints of the Motown factory, Stevie's talent couldn't help but shine through. Among pre-prime Stevie, I'd probably take For Once in My Life by a hair over this one (just because that one clearly felt like a coherent work while this one, as high as the high points may be, still feels like it was pieced together from whatever was laying around), but any fan of his should hear this eventually. It ultimately closed an epoch, even if nobody knew it at the time, and this sent the singles version of Stevie out on a high note.

Well, it's because the album is kind of a dud. This isn't the same as saying it's anything close to a bad album; Stevie's songwriting instincts were strong enough at this point that, even when used in the worst possible circumstance, the floor for one of his albums was above the level of disaster. The main problem with this album is that it sounds less like Stevie making an "adult" album and more like him making what he thinks an "adult" album is "supposed" to sound like. As much as I hate to fall into a cliche, I feel like plenty of blame for this needs to fall with Syreeta Wright, whom Stevie married during these recording sessions and who has co-writing credits on all of the songs. Stevie would later find ways to speak to societal ills in a way that actually blended well with his natural strengths, but on this album, his attempts at social commentary seem labored and awkward, and his attempts at musical "maturity" are no better. The opening duo of "Look Around" and "Do Yourself a Favor" have some memorable and (in the latter) some intense funky bits, but they're bleak in a way that's totally at odds with the strengths Stevie had developed in himself to this point and would continue to develop over the next few years. Plus, "Look Around" (and "Do Yourself a Favor" to a lesser extent) has some production choices that sound weirdly anachronistic; it sounds like something made in 1967 by a band that previously recorded in mono but wanted to take advantage of the "stereo" that the hippie kids were digging, and the way instruments are scattered in the two channels can't help but remind me of a college graduate who just learned about Powerpoint and thinks he needs to take advantage of EVERY POSSIBLE FEATURE in it (that may or may not have applied to me at one point). The lowest point of the album, though, comes in "I Wanna Talk to You," which ruins a potentially decent collection of sparsely arranged piano-based music by forcing a musical conversation between a young black man and an old white southern man (both voiced by Stevie) that probably sounded deep when it was being recorded but sounds so cartoonish that I can't take it seriously one bit. If I thought it was at all a joke I might be able to stand it in an ironic fashion, but ... I'm pretty sure it's not a joke.

The rest of the album suffers from production that isn't up to snuff with that of either of the albums that bookend this one, but at least the songs themselves are pretty decent (I even like the old-timey lightweight big-band jazzy "Take Up a Course in Happiness"). "Think of Me As Your Soldier" is a little sappy in the arrangement (the woodwinds are a little unnecessary), but Stevie's delivery is just fine, and I wouldn't mind it hearing it again from time to time. "Something Out of the Blue" is another slow ballad with unnecessary orchestration (once again the woodwinds are the big culprit), but it's centered around Stevie's keyboards instead of generic sap-jazz, and the bits of the harmonica that pop up fit in just as well as Stevie's harmonic fits in with many of his songs. "If You Really Love Me" is a throwback number, using The Funk Brothers and their horns during the chorus while Stevie does some slow crooning over piano in the verses, and while the two halves of the song don't fit perfectly, they're each good enough on their own that I like the song. On the second half, after "I Wanna Talk to You" and "Take Up a Course in Happiness," comes a magnificent slow piano ballad in "Never Dreamed You'd Leave in Summer," the one song from this album to make any sort of permanent mark; the lyrical metaphor is direct without being insultingly so, and it ultimately boils down to a song about losing somebody that could work equally well as a relationship lament and as a funeral song (like Stevie would later use it at Michael Jackson's funeral). And finally, "Sunshine in Their Eyes" probably doesn't deserve 7 minutes (and the children's backing vocals shoved into one channel sound ridiculous), but it's full of dramatic passion in Stevie's singing, and the upbeat secondary tune launched by a duet between Syreeta and Stevie is a delight in itself. So yeah, it can stick around.

This album didn't exactly help Stevie's career, but I'm still glad he made it at this point so that he could get the mistakes made on this album out of his system early on. Clearly Stevie didn't think much of this album either, given that the next one (with ostensibly not that much more artistic freedom than was granted to him on this one) sounds pretty much nothing like it. I suppose that I could hear an argument from a Stevie die-hard for why this album is secretly a lost masterpiece without thinking they're completely insane, but I can't see how anybody but an absolute die-hard fan would feel a need to visit this one on any sort of regular basis.

The general approach Stevie introduces on this album, and that he would build upon for the next few years, has a few fundamental principles. First: a proclivity towards creating music that not only blurred the boundaries between "white" (read: "pop") and "black" (read: "funk" and "soul") music, but also didn't especially concern itself with tight formulaic song-structures along the lines of what he had to follow in his teenage years. Second: extensive use of synthesizers to create a rich sonic pallette, replacing the tight-but-standard backing bands he had largely used to this point (one of the main gimmicks of this album and the next few is that Stevie would play most of the instruments himself, only bringing in others in very small doses). Third: extensive vocal overdubbing, with Stevie often creating a percussive effect solely through the army of looped backing vocals he would deploy. Fourth: a generally optimistic lyrical outlook, often heavily influenced by his Baptist upbringing, primarily focused on his own thoughts and feelings about life and only touching on societal ills in the broadest of terms. And fifth: a God-like feel for melody, not necessarily deployed in the most concise of manners, but with the ideas deployed in such a way that it be hard to get sick of a given tune before the conclusion of one of his songs.

The first two songs do a great job of showing all of these strengths in full force, even if they're longer than Stevie's typical material over the next few years. "Love Having You Around" is 7 minutes of great-sounding keyboards, tight drumming that propels an amazing groove, endless layers of vocal overdubs (many filtered with effects), and a terrific melody repeated just as many times as it could possibly sustain but not going beyond that threshold. Even better is "Superwoman," which is really two songs superglued to each other (one song that didn't have a clear ending, which goes into another song that didn't have a clear beginning), and the result is 8 minutes of bliss. The first half is gentle balladry with quiet jazzy guitar over keyboards that practically sound like they're glowing (and with a long stretched out hook based around the way the different iterations of "very well..." are sung before their corresponding following bits), and it's delightful, but the second half largely obliterates it, thanks to some of the most emotional early 70s synthesizer work imaginable and an aching melody that becomes devestating whenever it gets to the "Where were you when I needed you last winter?" line. The two halves are only really united by the presence of the jazzy guitar in both, but that's enough to make them sound as essential together as they are great apart.

Of course, the album isn't able to sustain quite such an amazing level as this for the duration. "Sweet Little Girl" isn't quite bad, but it's the closest thing to a bad song that Stevie would put out for while, largely thanks to the seemingly endless lustful monologuing from Stevie taking on the role of a dirty old man, and it's enough to make me dock this album a point from what it would otherwise get. "Girl Blue" and "Seems So Long" are each a little sleepy as well, and neither one has the emotional exuberance or sonic gimmicks that make the bulk of the album so enjoyable. The other four tracks are pretty great, though. "I Love Every Little Thing About You" grows from a quiet upbeat ballad into a GIANT UPBEAT CHORUS so quickly that it might be tacky in another context, but it absolutely works here, thanks to the total earnest-sounding sincerity with which Stevie seems to sing the song. "Happier Than the Morning Sun" is delightfully chipper throughout, featuring just Stevie and his clavinet (and a quiet bass in the background), and the scatting that takes over the middle of the song once again shows how much skill he had at making "non-serious" vocal sounds seem so resonant. "Keep on Running" is pure nervous tension expressed over almost 7 minutes, full of jittery rhythms in the keyboards, drums and vocals (both from Stevie and from the backing vocals) alike, and I don't see how someone could listen to this song without feeling the primal need to tap their foot repeatedly by minute three. And finally, the closing synth-heavy ballad "Evil" is so broad in its scope that it isn't really about anything bad in particular, yet this works to the song's advantage, making it sound like it's about everything bad in the whole world, and the lack of proper resolution to the end of the song (every time I hear I expect two more measures for the song) ends up giving it more power than it would otherwise have.

Had this been the culmination of Stevie's career, this would have been enough to cement Stevie, not necessarily in the top tier of great pop artists of the 60s and 70s, but as somebody who had transcended his limitations (both his own and those foisted upon him) to become somebody worth taking seriously in any discussion of serious figures of the era. That this album clearly ended up as the beginning of an era rather than the end of an era, then, means that Stevie was truly something special. Anyone who has somehow only heard one or two Stevie Wonder albums absolutely needs this.

Of course, for an album so filled to the brim with gorgeous pop ballads, it's more than somewhat ironic that its most iconic (and I would say best) song is a funk-rocker. "Superstition" is the Stevie Wonder song that everybody hears even before they realize they've ever heard a Stevie Wonder song, and it's amazing, featuring a killer clavinet riff, an amazing groove with an iconic set of horn lines, and fun lyrics that culminate in one of his best ever choruses. Two things are worth mentioning here: first, if you've never seen the clip of Stevie Wonder playing "Superstition" on "Sesame Street," go search for it right now and witness one of the greatest bits of pure entertainment imaginable. Second: I bought this album from a Best Buy in 2000, during my junior year of college, and as I got into my car on a warm spring day, I decided to roll down the window and start blasting "Superstition" as I drove home. At an intersection on the way out, a car rolled up next to me, with four African-American young men with their windows down. As they realized what I was listening to, they all turned their heads towards me, started bopping their heads in near-unison, and gave me very approving looks as they drove away. This is easily one of my ten favorite moments from when I was in college.

The album's one other start-to-finish funk-rocker, "Maybe Your Baby" (based around another set of hard-tinged clavinet licks), is maybe a little less gripping than "Superstition," but it's still a blast, and the seemingly endless coda, far from hurting the song, ends up making it feel more anthemic and important than it might have been otherwise. Otherwise, though, the album is nothing but ballads and lightweight (in a good way) pop numbers, though there is still some clear stylistic variety in this regard. "Tuesday Heartbreak" is an especially upbeat number, with keyboards that sound like wah-wah guitars and with some tasteful alto sax thrown in, and if it's one of the weaker numbers on the album, that just says more about the album than anything else. "Big Brother" is another upbeat number, with an arrangement that gives it an almost country-ish vibe in parts even though it's just Stevie playing his typical instruments (clavinet, drums, harmonica, and Moog bass) in a way that's not especially different from usual (maybe there's a little more emphasis on harmonica than usual). "Lookin' for Another Pure Love" is closer to the mystical sound of the remaining ballads, but it differs from the others by having two guitarists, one of whom is Jeff Beck (who throws in a fascinating quiet solo in the middle), and it's an absolutely lovely way to spend about five minutes.

The other five songs have similar mystical, majestic vibes to them, even if their specific melodic and emotional content differs significantly, and they're all spectacular. "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" (which starts with Jim Gilstrap and then Lani Groves each singing a couple of lines before Stevie comes in) became one of Stevie's most iconic songs almost as soon as this album came out, and while I can name a good handful from him that I like more than this one, it's still as lovely as can be. "You and I" leans more heavily on the mystical, majestic vibe than it does on crisp melody, but the song totally works, as Stevie draws upon his training as a soul singer and channels it into a different mode from what he had used it for before, and I can see why it became such an attractive song to cover. "You've Got it Bad Girl" rounds out the first half in a very quiet and subdued manner, where the shiny synths end up obscuring the lustful nature of the lyrics in a way that creates a fascinating sense of tension.

On the second half, "Blame It on the Sun" features a co-writing credit (in the lyrics) from Stevie's now-ex-wife Syreeta, and the song is easily on par with the best material from Music of My Mind. In this one, the arrangement emphasis is on piano, with synths just giving some light textural enhancement, and Stevie's vocal delivery, in which laments all the possible reasons a relationship failed but ultimately has to admit that it was probably his own fault, is excellent even by the high standards of vocal performances on this album. And finally, the closing "I Believe (When I Fall in Love It Will Be Forever)" is an amazing epic (at least it feels epic; it's only 4:50) built around clavinet and slow Moog bass, with an incredible chorus, and the secondary melody ("The many sounds that meet our ears ..." etc) may well be my favorite snippet of vocal melody on the album. Plus, the extended coda, first built around an extended repetition of the chorus, then moving into an unexpected funk groove that comes out of nowhere that ultimately closes the album, is a masterful capstone that ultimately cements the album with the rating that it gets.

If you don't have Talking Book, you need to get Talking Book. If you don't like Talking Book, well, there's something wrong with your soul and I pity the hell you face on a daily basis. And to think that this wasn't his peak ...

The odd thing about Innervisions is that, while I'd rate it his best and also as the first Stevie Wonder album for a newbie to purchase, it's also a somewhat out-of-character album for him. The uplifting exuberance that characterized so much of Music of My Mind and Talking Book, while by no means missing, is no longer Stevie's default emotion, and really there is no single emotional category that one could use to summarize this album; there's happiness, but there's also anger, and cynicism, and quiet meditative ambiguity, among others. This album also marks a return to offering social commentary, which could have been a dangerous proposition given that his last serious attempt at this resulted in the mediocre Where I'm Coming From, but Stevie's approach to delivering social commentary this time around is so much slicker, so much more polished, and so subversive that the two albums are barely in the same musical universe.

Oddly enough, out of the album's nine tracks, I actually think the opener is the weakest (hey, something has to be last), even if it's quite good on the whole. "Too High" is built around an oddly lumbering Moog bass line that anchors the groove while Stevie sings about a girl who dies from getting high, and while I don't love the high-pitched "Dodo do do do dodo ..." backing vocals, they're discordant enough to be intriguing, and both the vocal melody and the harmonica break are enough to make it worth listening to once in a while apart from the whole album. The next song, then, is not generally regarded among the album's great highlights, but here's a case where I have to strongly go against the grain: "Visions" is not only one of my favorites on the album but might well be a top 5 Stevie Wonder track for me overall (it's definitely top 10).The mix of the stately keyboards with the quiet guitars (an acoustic playing a simple pattern and an electric playing an even simpler downward pattern, with a very light amount of soloing later in the song) creates an atmosphere that has fascinated me from my first listen, and the lyrics, well, they're the first time that Stevie has really confronted the elephant in the room (his blindness), and the way he does so is spell-binding. He's blind, yes, but while he doesn't see the exact things that other people see, he still knows that different things have different appearances (e.g. leaves turning from green to brown), even if what he imagines as green and brown may not be how other people see green and brown. Further, is it really so great to see things in the world as they actually are when the ideal world is something that we can only envision in our minds, and doesn't this mean Stevie can see what really matters just as well as anybody else can? Maybe this isn't exactly the meaning of the song, but this is what I hear, and this message, reinforced by the gorgeous music, hits me deep.

As much as I love "Visions," though, "Living for the City" (all 7:22 of it) is definitely at the heart of the general high regard given to Innervisions. The rising keyboard chords at the beginning immediately give an epic feel on par with most prog rock songs, and the ensuing groove (inexplicably played entirely by Stevie; I know this sort of thing is what he's most famous for but it still blows my mind that this is just one person) is unstoppable and gives a platform for some of Stevie's best singing ever. The story it tells, of a young black man born in Mississippi who goes to New York City by bus in search of a better life, only to immediately get framed for selling drugs, get thrown in jail for ten years, and have his life ruined, is told in vivid detail both in the main song and in the extended samples in the middle, and while the story is poignant on its own, the song is a great testament to the ability of music to amplify the emotional effect of text in a way that doing so without music often can't.

Just when it starts to feel like the album, great as it is, has largely gotten away from Stevie's previously established strengths completely, the first side ends with "Golden Lady," and the reminder comes that, oh yeah, this is still the same Stevie Wonder as before. It's as lush and as grandiose and as memorable as any ballad from Talking Book, and the coda, with Stevie repeatedly singing the chorus but starting each iteration one tone higher than in the previous iteration, gives a sense of the song flying away into the heavens that only adds to its majesty. Having walked home from the train in many an evening commute, I can say without equivocation that few things are more satisfying in the early evening than to walk home in the mid-spring in 70 degree weather while listening to this song.

The second half, then, is every bit as emotionally intense as the first half, and all the better for it. The side has one ballad, "All in Love is Fair," which uses a simple rolling piano line as the foundation for a grandiose ballad that almost sounds like something from Procol Harum, only sounding way better than it would have from Procol Harum because Stevie puts on a better vocal performance here than Gary Booker could have ever done (I know that their voices are generally not comparable in style, but the music reminds me so much of PH that I can't help it). The final belting out of "All in love is FAAAAAAIIIIIIR" is one of the best moments on an album filled with great moments.

Of the other four songs on this half, the one that I'm not totally wild about is "Jesus Children of America," which has an interesting tense groove built around low-key synths and a good set of Stevie vocals (based in the lead and in the background layerings), but where the lyrics (which seem to about some combination of drug addiction and false priests selling false religion) hearken back to Where I'm Coming From just a little too much for my tastes, and while I still like it I'm not sure it really helps the album much. The other funk groove on this half, though, is an unstoppable monster; "Higher Ground" inevitably prompts comparisons to "Superstition," and if it's not as good it's at least 95% as good. The wah sound he gets out of the clavinet in this song is amazing, the groove (driven again by drums and Moog bass) is again spectacular, and anybody who can resist that vocal melody is too snobbish for their own good.

The album ultimately finishes with two up-beat piano-heavy pop songs, and while these are not often considered among the best parts of the album, I would contend that, actually, these are among the best parts of the album. "Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing" might be lightweight, but it's a perfectly polished jewel, and I wouldn't change a single second of it; the opening spoken part with Stevie trying in vain to impress a girl with his foreign language skills cracks me up every time, and from there the song is just one glorious hook after another, with Stevie producing one interesting variation after another of the main ideas, while the latin-tinged groove (with great sounding percussion!) gives the song life that another backing track might not have provided. And finally, "He's Misstra Know-It-All" takes Stevie's gift for writing up-lifting, life-affirming pop-balladry, with an insanely catchy vocal melody and all sorts of gimmicks (in Stevie's singing but in other ways as well) laid on top as the song goes on, and redirects that gift towards a mockery of Nixon (not by name, but it's definitely Nixon), with a long fade-out that gets in as many swipes at him as posible before the album ends.

There was a brief period after this album's release where it looked like this might actually be the last Stevie Wonder album; a car accident left him in a coma for four days (there's a great story of somebody singing "Higher Ground" in his ear while he was in the coma and realizing then, after Stevie started moving his fingers along, that he'd be ok), and while he ultimately came out of it fine, he lost his sense of smell and taste for a while. While this would have been a terrible outcome, one that would have deprived the world of one of its leading pop music talents and of more great music to come, I can also say that, had he died, his musical legacy would have been every bit as secure as it ultimately ended up. As with all of his albums in this amazing stretch, this is a must own.

There is one instance on the album where Stevie makes a clear attempt to include a song in line with what he feels the buying public expects of him, and it's a somewhat awkward inclusion, but I don't really think "You Haven't Done Nothin'" deserves some of the scorn I've seen it receive through the years. Yes, it's a transparent attempt to milk the style of "Superstition" and "Higher Ground" by making another up-tempo clavinet-heavy horn-driven funk-stomper, and yes, the guest appearance from The Jackson 5 is underwhelming (they just contribute "doo doo wop" backing vocals), but man, the big dramatic moment when the clavinet slams its way into the song after the descending sounds of the introduction entertains me every time, and the song is good enough on its own merits that I can avoid thinking about its derivative nature while it's on. Maybe in a certain sense it would have been braver for Stevie to release an entire album that completely avoided anything like what he'd done the previous albums, but I can't say that the album is somehow worse for the inclusion of this track.

The first half of this album is amazing, containing two of Stevie's best songs ever and three songs whose charms are more subtle but that are terrific nonetheless. "Heaven is 10 Zillion Light Years Away" is Stevie at his most explicitly spiritual, taking a gentle clavinet-driven ballad and fusing it to the gospel sensibilities that had so heavily informed him growing up (the song is about how the seeming absence of God in a world full of pain and hardship has much more to do with us than it does with God), and the slow clap-along chorus is something to admire. In a lot of ways, this one strikes as somewhat of a stylistic throwback to Music of My Mind (especially in the deployment of so many Stevie overdubs), but with a good deal more emotional and spiritual maturity here than there. "Creepin'," on the other hand is Stevie at his most sensual (not sexual, sensual) and mystical; the sound he gets from his synthesizers here is otherworldly, which befits a song about dreams, and everything about the vocals (not just from Stevie but from an amazing Minnie Riperton), in terms of the melody (especially in the GODLIKE hook of "Why must it be you always creeeeeeeeeeep into my dreeeams"), the delivery, and the lyrics, has to rank among the best things he ever did. The harmonica solo that grows out of the vocal melody is a great one as well, one that takes on mystical qualities in the same way, for instance, that Dylan's harmonica took on mystical qualities in "All Along the Watchtower" or the like.

The other three songs on the side, as stated, are not quite as mind-blowing, but they're very nice. "Smile Please" sounds much less like an album opener than a track one would expect to find buried in the middle of the second side, but this weirdly seems to fit the album, and the main hook, based around the nonsense sounds of "Bum bum di ti bum," is as charming as anything from Stevie can be. "Too Shy to Say" features a fascinating blend of piano balladry (which could have fit in just fine on Talking Book) with pedal steel guitar, and the gentle resolution into "That I really love you" is something only Stevie could have really pulled off. "Boogie on Reggae Woman" (neither boogie nor reggae), then, is a fascinating curiosity, driven by a Moog bassline that, for all of its complication upon closer examination, ultimately has an effect that's much more percussive than harmonic. The blend of this bassline with snippets of piano for decoration, with the drums and congas keeping up the beat underneath, and with Stevie's harmonica part (where he uses a different kind of harmonica from usual) makes for a hypnotizing effect, and the long jam near the end is one that I could have stood to listen to for another minute easily.

On the second side, after the energetic blast of "You Haven't Done Nothin'," the album basically becomes a mood album, but this term is used in the absolute best sense available to it. "It Ain't No Use" only really stands out because of the "bye bye, bye bye bye" hook, but sometimes a song only needs one strong hook, and this one is strong enough to sustain the whole. "They Won't Go When I Go" (written with Yvonne Lowrene Wright, the sister of Syreeta) is the one song in this stretch that really stands out, thanks to the deeply funereal tone of the song (it's based around a German Protestant hymn related to Christ's suffering), and the blend of the dramatic piano and the wailing backing vocals makes for a deeply moving six minutes. "Bird of Beauty," then, is a shift back to a more cheerful outlook on life, largely courtesy of the goofy synth effect that underpins the song but also courtesy of the overall message, that one genuinely doesn't need pills (presumably like the pain pills Stevie would have required in the aftermath of the accident) to find happiness and joy in life. Finally, "Please Don't Go" seems to be a song written from the perspective of Stevie's loved ones, who would have been devastated had the accident taken his life, and the way these pleading lyrics blend with such ultimately cheerful and upbeat music makes for a perfect ambiguous ending to an album filled to the brim with ambiguity.

If for whatever reason you've put off listening to this album on the grounds that you looked at the song list and didn't recognize any of the titles from common usage in pop culture, you should fix this hole in your listening knowledge as soon as you can. Maybe this isn't quite filled to the brim with sparkling pop-balladry like Talking Book was, and maybe this isn't as hard-hitting as Innervisions was, and maybe this isn't as comprehensive as Songs in the Key of Life soon would be, but there's just as much of a place for the downbeat as for the upbeat, and FFF fills its role every bit as well as those albums fill theirs.

1. Songs in the Key of Life is the greatest album ever made.
2. Most of the songs on SitKoL are at least a minute overlong.

Even if I wouldn't quite go quite as far as putting SitKoL near the very peak of my music collection (it's more or less settled as a top 50-70 album for me, and it took a little while for the album to get even that high), I totally understand these sentiments. As an aggregate experience, this album (a double album he made after taking 1975 off and briefly considering retirement from the music industry) is awe-inspiring, displaying the full breadth of Stevie's capabilities as a mature artist, in terms of mood, style, melody, and arrangements. The overall effect can be overwhelming ... but there are also more than a few moments where, after having listened to this album many times over the years, I find myself glancing at my music player and feeling a moment of surprise that there's still a minute or two left in a given track. I don't want to complain about this too much; the excessive lengths largely have the effect of fully revealing the potential power of a given track but don't generally exceed the potential power of a given track (it might have been nice in some cases for Stevie to leave the listener wanting more, but it wouldn't have been necessary), and Stevie shows a knack on this album for developing tracks into something largely different from how they start, so the lengths are mostly justified. And yet, the "huh this is still going" effect continues to happen to me when I listen to this album enough that, even if I'm giving it a very high grade, I still feel perfectly justified in slotting it behind Innervisions (which feels tighter in aggregate).

In discussing the material of this album (and boy there's a lot of it), I should first note that, for years, I had an incorrect understanding of what material actually constituted Songs in the Key of Life. Like many people my age, plus or minus a decade, my music purchasing habits have mostly been centered around CDs, and when I bought this album in 2003, I bought it as a 2-CD set with 21 tracks (12 tracks on the first CD, 9 tracks on the second). It was only much later that I learned that I had been deceived; Songs in the Key of Life is not a 21-track album like I had been led to believe, but a 17-track album, and the last 2 tracks on each disc had originally belonged to a supplementary EP called A Something's Extra, which was bundled with some versions of the original LP release. I suppose that the instrumental "Easy Goin' Evening (My Mama's Call)" is a bit unremarkable in comparison (it's slow harmonica playing over low-key keyboards and light jazzy drums and bass), but it's still rather nice, and it largely pales only because the other 3 tracks on the EP are so mindboggling. "Saturn" is one of Stevie's most majestic and ambitious ballads, both in lyrics and in music, with Stevie presenting the idea of Saturn as a sort of cosmic refuge for those sick of the world's ills, and the blend between piano, synths and guitar is spellbinding. "Ebony Eyes" is very silly but all the better for it, featuring Stevie singing over a lumbering piano melody and distorting his voice in fun ways in praise of an attractive girl, and I enjoy the idea of the largely earnest Stevie committing himself to a track as goofy as this one. Finally, "All Day Sucker" is built around an oddly unsettling rhythm and a peculiar guitar/synth/drums arrangement on top of the rhythm, and it's just such a fascinating blend of traditional funk/pop values and forward-looking sounds that it probably would have been one of the couple of best songs on the main album had it been included originally. I suppose there's a case it could have easily been a good deal shorter than 5 minutes, but hey, that just means that, were it on the main album, it would blend all the better with the rest.

The album itself is every bit of a fascinating blend of styles as the EP that accompanied it. The opening "Love's in Need of Love Today" is a slow gentle anthem that easily could have been 5 minutes long, but the coda that stretches it to 7, with Stevie scatting with seemingly a dozen backing Stevie clones backing him up, is totally worth it, milking the gospel vibe of the song as much as it could possibly be milked. While "Love's in Need of Love Today" sounds like something that could have plausibly come from an earlier album, though, the next three tracks are immensely different from each other and from before, and they make it clear that Stevie's plan for this album went far beyond any sort of stylistic retread. "Have a Talk With God" and "Village Ghetto Land" each base themselves around synths in a fascinating way, the former with a bubbling and burbling pattern over which Stevie sings (about prayer) and sporadically chimes in with harmonica, and the latter with a very regal sound from his state-of-the-art Yamaha over which Stevie sings about the bad parts of cities where poor people have to try to live. And then, in a most unexpected development, the instrumental (except for wordless backing vocals) "Contusion" comes up, and it sounds much less like something that should belong on a Stevie Wonder album and much more like something from an album like One Size Fits All (from Frank Zappa), featuring interesting guitar interplay over tight drumming and off-kilter keyboards.

"Sir Duke" rounds out the first side with a bouncy, horn-driven pop song that exudes pure joy (it's a tribute to the recently-deceased Duke Ellington, who had been a major influence on Stevie), and in turn the second side starts with a bouncy, horn-heavy (but keyboard-driven) pop song in "I Wish," where Stevie reminisces about the simpler days of his childhood (presumably from before he became a child pop star). From there, the side features a couple of amazing piano ballads ("Knocks Me Off My Feet" and "Summer Soft") which sandwich the infamous (and endlessly addictive) "Pastime Paradise," whose nagging synth line and lyrics (where the chorus features a lot of words that end in "-tion") ended up getting sampled for "Gangsta's Paradise" (and ultimately reached its peak form with "Amish Paradise"). The side ends with "Ordinary Pain," which starts off as a gentle keyboard-centric ballad (about a breakup, from the perspective of the guy initiating it) before entering an extended synth-heavy jam with Shirley Brewer telling off her (now former) man, and the passionate fury of this portion is so intense that I kinda feel like it could have gone on several more minutes without totally losing my interest.

Side three, then, is all over the place in terms of style and emotion (in only 3 tracks!), and it's all the better for it. "Isn't She Lovely" absolutely deserves all of its fame, as Stevie does an incredible job of capturing the wonder that a parent has for their child during those first few months when they're absolutely dependent on you (he wisely stays away from the "I'm in hell when is this going to end" emotional state that comes when you have multiple children and they refuse to get on a coherent sleep schedule), complete with a long harmonica solo over samples of his daughter discovering the wonder of bath-time. "Joy Inside My Tears" is one of Stevie's best ballads ever, a slow plod (in a good way) that blends high-pitched and low-pitched synths with piano in a genius way, and the way the vocal melody winds its way to the title (while the synth winds along with it) is a glory to behold. And then, in something completely different, comes "Black Man," an up-tempo horn-heavy synth-funk rocker pushing the idea that great accomplishments have come from all race and gender combinations, and while the ending coda of teachers yelling historical trivia questions at students and the students responding like marine recruits answering a drill sergeant is a little overdone, the cumulative intensity of the song is so amazing that I can't help but get revved up by it.

Side four starts with a bit of a dud in "Ngiculela - Es Una Historia / I Am Singing" (I won't skip the song when it comes on but it isn't especially memorable or moving, and I can't remotely imagine a situation where somebody would list this as one of their three favorite songs of the album), but the side gradually heats up until it's a blazing inferno by the end. "If it's Magic" is a gentle song featuring just Stevie's voice, his harmonica, and a harp, and it works well not only as a nice song in its own right but also as a calm before the impending storm. "As" starts off sounding like it will just turn out as another gentle keyboard ballad (this time about the impossibility of his love for another coming to an end), but it quickly becomes something much grander, featuring a big anthemic (and getting longer with each repetition) refrain with vocal back-and-forth between Stevie and Mary Lee Whitney, while Herbie Hancock throws in some keyboard work in a long jam (over which Stevie ends up screaming with as much fury as he can bring up) where time pretty much ceases to have any discernable meaning. And finally, "Another Star" is 8 minutes of big-band Latin-turned-disco, and it's a song where I'd ultimately feel about it the same if it was half as long or twice as long; it's an absolutely unstoppable groove, and in every way the perfect capstone to the album.

Selfishly, I kinda wish that Stevie ultimately had followed through on the idea he'd had before recording this and retired after this album was finished. This album (and the accompanying EP) is such a tsunami of creative ideas that it would have been difficult in the best of circumstances for Stevie to come close to it ever again, and sadly, at the age of 26, this album marked the sharp end of his powers to make truly great and impactful music. From now on, unless he was engaging in completely self-indulgent experimentation (see the next album), the best he could ever hope for was to provide a passable interpretation of the musical world around him; never again would he have the power to set terms for everyone else. Yet while the rest of his career didn't go especially well (he did fine monetarily, but artistically it wasn't the same), I'd have to say that, if the price of this album was 30 years of relative insignificance, then it was still worth it. If for whatever reason you haven't heard this album yet, listen to it today and then go sit in a corner and think about what you've done by waiting this long.

A comparison I've sometimes seen for this album, not in terms of style but in terms of function in an overall career, is Bob Dylan's Self Portrait album, and on the surface I see the appeal for the comparison. This album makes no attempt to live up to the standard expectations of a Stevie Wonder album, the same way Self Portrait made no attempt to live up to the standard expectations of a Bob Dylan album, and as a consequence of this there is sometimes a desire to make the case of "Well, if you just accept this album on its own merits and don't consider his previous work it's quite good" for this album (in much the same way I have made this case for liking Self Portrait). Here's where I think this argument breaks down, though: Self Portrait wasn't quite the stylistic left turn that it's made out to be, and in fact it is in many ways a logical continuation of the last couple of albums (it would be different if Self Portrait had immediately followed Blonde on Blonde, but John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline had already put Bob firmly on the road to quiet, humble country music). Journey, in terms of style, has nothing logical about it in the context of Stevie's career; for him to switch from analog synths to digital synths (a huge blow; Stevie's mastery of analog synths was a huge part of the appeal of his mid-70s albums, and now that advantage is gone), and from Soul/Funk-based pop to a style based in New Age and Ambient as much as pop, without any intermediate releases suggesting moves in this direction to prime the listener, was an incredibly bold move, and it was ultimately an unsustainable move. Sometimes taking big risks pays off in a positive way, but sometimes big risks backfire, and this is a case of the latter.

There are a lot of instrumentals on here, mostly based in very stately and often bombastic keyboards, and generally Stevie doesn't show himself to have the same capability for static instrumentals that, say, Brian Eno did (and Brian often struggled with it!). I quite like the instrumental version of "Send One Your Love" (the actual song was the closest thing this album had to a hit, but it's kind of an adult contemporary bore), and most of them seem nice enough in the moment (and "Ecclesiastes" has a church-organ-like vibe to it that I really dig), but life's too short to try and come up with solid reasons to prefer one to another. Maybe these tracks would work better in context, but alas, we'll never know.

The "normal" songs, aside from "Send On Your Love," range from enjoyable-but-dorky to surprisingly bad. The surprisingly bad songs are "Race Babbling" (I really have no idea how this would have belong on a documentary about plants), a go-nowhere 9-minute disco groove built on plastic-sounding synthesizers that spits on the legacy of "Another Star" and "A Seed's a Star/Tree Medley," performed live but so dorky that I don't even care about the energy of the live performance. Of the other normal songs, I guess my favorites are "Same Old Story," which uses acoustic guitars, piano and harmonica to create the vibe of overlooking a swamp in the south, "Outside My Window," a charming song full of "la la la" vocals that has a pretty strong chorus ("My love lives outside my window ..." is about as good of a chorus as anything Stevie wrote in the 70s), and "Come Back as a Flower," a piano ballad sung by Syreeta Wright (who also wrote the lyrics) that ponders reincarnation in a charming way. Otherwise ... ehn, I guess "Black Orchid" has a moderately charming chorus that I wouldn't mind hearing again. The rest of the tracks are forgettable for one reason or another.

Ultimately, I like a surprising amount of this album on some level or another, but I also think it doesn't hold together as a coherent album nearly to the degree that I would hope for (especially since this album is clearly intended to work on an album level more than an individual track level). I ultimately settled on a 7 for it, meaning I like it about as much as I like Where I'm Coming From, but as with that album, I don't really feel great about going even that high. This is worth a couple of listens, but going beyond that strikes me as a waste of a life (and yes, I'm aware of the irony here).

Eventually, I got over this somewhat, and I gathered myself back to my usual philosophy that if a great artist doesn't make a great album, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad album. This album doesn't show the full force of a genius at the peak of his powers, but it does suggest someone who at one point could have been a genius at the peak of his powers, and even at its worst the album is still enjoyable and clearly competent. The very best song is the closing "Happy Birthday," an ecstatic number in praise of Martin Luther King Jr (Stevie was heavily involved in the effort to get King's birthday made into a federal holiday) that uses a shuffling synth pattern as an interesting base over which the melody repeatedly builds into a joyous "Happy birthday to you! etc." that would have been worthy of any of his classic albums. The other big hit was "Master Blaster (Jammin')," an ode to Bob Marley (hence the reggae style), and while I don't like this quite as much as "Happy Birthday" (Stevie sounds a little bit like a poseur here), I can totally understand why it was a hit, and the descending line in the chorus is pretty impressive, so I end up liking it more than not.

The other tracks are fine, but they generally suggest that Stevie was trying too hard to show he still had it, whatever "it" was. "Did I Hear You Say You Love Me" is a decent up-tempo synth-heavy funk-pop-rocker, and "All I Do" is a good moody synth-heavy beat-heavy ballad, but that's all they are; they entertain in the moment, and then they leave little residue once they're done. "Rocket Love" has enough atmosphere (and Stevie's rising "doo doo doo" vocals near the beginning are interesting enough) to keep my attention, and "As If You Read My Mind" has enough drive from the combination of the insistent drum part and the keyboards to not dismiss them (and once again, there's a strong chorus), but again, this level of praise is relatively scant for someone who had been doing much more just a few years earlier. At least the first half has "I Ain't Gonna Stand For it," where Stevie does an incredible imitation of a country-western crooner, and where the country and funk aspects blend in such a genial way that it almost seems odd that this wouldn't happen more often.

Of the remaining three, I'm most partial towards the mournful piano ballad "Lately," which absolutely sounds like it could have been a leftover from Talking Book or SitKoL, and which is the album's clearest indication that Stevie's earlier skills hadn't gone away, they'd just become misdirected. "Do Like You" and "Cash in Your Face" are each up-beat songs with their own respective charms (the former has the neat way Stevie sings words like "aaaaaanswer" or "daaaaancer" while the latter is trashy in ways that make it pretty endearing), but they're definitely second-rate, even by the standards of this new stage of Stevie's career.

The grade here is borderline, and nobody should feel fooled into thinking this is somehow a lost gem (it got good reviews at the time but the only people I've seen seriously go to bat for it are major Stevie fans), but at this point, Stevie clearly still hadn't totally lost the skills that had brought him to such a terrific place as a pop artist. At the very least, this album is worth hearing for "I Ain't Gonna Stand for it," "Lately," and "Happy Birthday," all of which should please anybody who likes Stevie on the whole.

This album suuuuuuuuucks. A small amount of blame has to be given to the presence of Dionne Warwick, who actually gets a track entirely to herself ("Moments Aren't Moments," which passes me by without leaving a single impression) and who also duets with Stevie on a couple of tracks ("It's You" and "Weakness," pop ballads that might as well be white noise). Most of the blame has to fall squarely with Stevie, though, as he is responsible for the songwriting and (with Gary Olazabal, who had worked on Stevie's albums as an Engineer since Innervisions) production. On this album, he completely fell for every bad cliche of 80s pop music in terms of production, keyboard sounds, and percussion approaches; these aspects of generic 80s pop music could be used skillfully, of course, but they tended to be useful only for those who had in some way been instrumental in crafting the cliches, and definitely not for older musicians trying to grab on to them in a desperate effort to sound relevant. One of the funniest sentences I've ever read in a Wikipedia article is in the article for this album, in which it's stated that, in the UK, this album was kept away from reaching #1 in the UK by Now That's What I Call Music 3 and Tonight (by David Bowie), and that's exactly the company this album deserves to keep in the public memory.

A couple of tracks are less terrible than the whole. I kinda like the gentle jazzy instrumental "It's More Than You," with a decent mix of synths, piano, and harmonica over a subdued rhythm section, and ... well ... I guess "I Just Called to Say I Love You" isn't horrendous. I mean, it's basically a Hallmark movie made into a song, and the upwards modulation trick that had worked so well in "Golden Lady" sounds pretty tacky here, but at the same time, that melody does show a lot of the grace that had made Stevie so appealing in the first place, and the voice effects would have at least been somewhat novel at the time.

As for the rest, well, just look at the rating. The two biggest offenders are "Love Light in Flight" (seven minutes of the worst of mid-80s film soundtrack cliches) and "Don't Drive Drunk" (literally a 6:33 PSA for Mothers Against Drunk Driving, filled with some of the most embarassing combinations of vocal, production, and drums I've ever heard), but the title track isn't much better (I guess I can imagine a situation where it would have sounded better with the production from Hotter Than July), and guess what, I've mentioned the whole album. Maybe it's not among the very worst albums I've ever heard from an artist that I generally like a lot, but at best it's a tier above that, and that's not a great place to be. At least something like With a Song in My Heart could be forgiven somewhat due to Stevie trying to do his best in a situation not entirely in his control; with this album, Stevie had nobody to blame but himself. The thought that only 8 years had elapsed between Songs in the Key of Life and this one sends a small shiver down my spine.

While Stevie's skills as a master arranger were now far in the past, he still had some remaining skill as a songwriter (as well as a great older song he hadn't yet released) and as a singer, and while not every song on here is strong enough to rise above the baseline of mediocrity set by the arrangements, enough of them are to somewhat salvage the album. The best song here is the piano-heavy ballad "Overjoyed," which Stevie had originally written during the Journey sessions and would have been the best song on there as well; the piano melody is as strong as anything he wrote during his classic period, the strings provide a nice touch, the "environmental percussion" (crickets, birds, pebbles being dropped in water etc.) sounds totally appropriate, and the singing lives up to the title, showing Stevie's core skill of conveying pure joy in a way that doesn't seem forced or cloying. Much weaker (mostly due to the arrangements), but still rather nice, are the gentle ballad "Stranger on the Shore of Love," courtesy of a strong chorus that's able to overcome many other things, and "Whereabouts," which makes the interesting decision to start the song with the chorus and ends up sounding pretty powerful despite its potential to sound gloppy. Among the more up-tempo songs, I'm fond of the opening hit single "Part-Time Lover," where Stevie's use of contemporary production and styles actually sounds skilled rather than clumsy, and as ridiculous as the synth-bass and Pacman noises sound, I like "Spiritual Walkers" and its goofy attempt at 80s synth-funk.

The rest is ... ehn ... not really worth describing. I guess that the closing "It's Wrong (Apartheid)" would have had lyrical resonance in 1985, but it sounds pretty silly today, and the rest tops out at "pretty good" in terms of melody and at "mediocre" in terms of arrangements. Come to think of it, maybe even the grade I'm giving it is too high, but at the same time the best parts are pretty strong, so I'm willing to lean somewhat positive on this relative to my gut. "Overjoyed" and a couple of others are definitely worth your money, but the rest is disposable.

I like exactly three songs on here, and barely a second more. The opening "You Will Know" features some lovely synths that sway back and forth like waves on a calm sea, and Stevie's spiritual pleadings for humanity in the verses and in the chorus sound genuinely moving; it won me over despite some initial resistance. "With Each Beat of My Heart" is another gentle keyboard ballad, with Stevie giving a lovely vocal effort over finger snaps and his own vocal overdubs in a way that manages to suggest his previous approaches while having just enough of a modern sheen to make the song sound contemporary without sounding retro. And finally, the album closer (not counting the bonus tracks), "Free," is based around a nagging mournful keyboard line fleshed out by piano, harpsichord, and other keyboards in a mixture that sounds more in line with Stevie's traditional strengths than is shown typically on this album, and the vocal melody, supported by gospel-like backing vocals in tasteful manners, shows that he could still come up with real winners when he wanted to.

The rest of the album, sadly, makes me question the extent to which he wanted to write strong vocal melodies ... or come up with interesting arrangements. Much of the rest of the album is built around simplistic electronic beats (some faster than others) and terrible sounding synths, with much more of an emphasis on swagger than on songcraft in anyway that I typically recognize, and I have a very difficult time finding anything to enjoy among these. "Skeletons" got a lot of buzz due to the political nature of its lyrics (it's about public figures with skeletons in their closet), and I guess if somebody wanted to make an argument that this is somehow a late 80s incarnation of "Higher Ground" they could, but I find it dreadfully dull. "Get It" also got a lot of buzz, primarily due to the appearance of Michael Jackson as a guest vocalist, but I've never been a fan of his, and I don't enjoy this one either. The rest of the album is basically a blur to me, with some songs leaning towards the more intense ("Dark and Lovely"), some towards the more goofy ("In Your Corner," "Galaxy Paradise"), and some towards making no impression on me at all ("One of a Kind," "Cryin' Through the Night"), but none of them making me feel the least bit happy to hear them.

The album also comes with a couple of bonus tracks, but neither of them are even decent, so they're not worth describing (even if one of them has both B.B. King and Stevie Ray Vaughan as guest stars and totally wastes them). In total, then, this a low point for Stevie, and while I'll happily listen to the three songs I like from here on occasion, I can't fathom a situation where I would ever go out of my way to listen to any of this again. Even hardcore fans can skip this one.

The songs on here that I feel like would have worked well on a "normal" Stevie Wonder album, with higher expectations than those attached to this album, are "Queen in the Black" (which has some sense of lustful danger and a tasteful keyboard arrangement under the pounding drums), the atmospheric piano ballad "Make Sure You're Sure," the happy bouncy title track (which has the strongest hook on the album by a mile, silly as it might be), the gentle ballad "I Go Sailing," and the closing "Lighting up the Candles," which sounds like a pale imitation of his greatest 70s successes but at least has some charm. Beyond those, though, the album has a lot of songs that work best so long as you're not paying any attention to them, such as the opening "Fun Day" (lots of giddy cheer and little else) or "These Three Words" (a totally forgettable ballad) or "Each Other's Throat" (where Stevie, um, raps, and which might have sounded like a lot of fun for about five minutes in 1991 and would have sounded ridiculous thereafter). The others don't even deserve a half-assed namecheck.

The weird thing is, while this album doesn't hold up to any sort of close scrutiny, it generally sounds pretty great so long as you're not paying attention to it (as mentioned earlier), and unfortunately that's only sort of a compliment. Divorced from the film, this album is about presenting the idea (in caricature form) of Stevie Wonder more than it's about presenting Stevie Wonder himself, and if the idea of Stevie Wonder is enough to make you like an album, regardless of the actual songs on the album, then this could easily be one you could like more than I do. For me, though, the version of Stevie Wonder that I care about had (seemingly) long since vanished, and the artist who emerged in his stead just isn't one that appeals to me much, and neither does this album. I give it as high of a grade as I do because I don't remotely hate this album, but I can't go any higher either.

Every song on here is at least decent in its core (though often made less impressive through the padding), and some are remarkable even when the length is accounted for. My favorites are buried in the middle of the album and weren't hits, and thus I somewhat overlooked them at first, but both "I'm New" and "My Love is With You" are among the very best songs Stevie wrote after his prime. "I'm New" is a slow burner based around a fascinating looped vocal part (and with some very subdued backing vocals elsewhere), and the slow guitar solo at the end creates a big ball of tension that never gets resolved, to excellent effect. "My Love is With You" is based around a big anthemic synth line and eventually has a GIANT anthemic chorus that eventually turns into the foundation for an extended coda that's as impressive as any of the extended codas on Songs. The bullet sound effects near the end are surprisingly effective as well.

The singles from the album aren't amazing, but they're quite good on the whole. "Treat Myself" has a jazz flute part that initially makes the song sound like very upbeat Jethro Tull, and even if the uplifting vibe of the song feels like it's been part of a few dozen Stevie songs at this point, it's at least in the service of a song where the melody doesn't seem quite so familiar. "Tomorrow Robins Will SIng" brings in reggae elements to blend with the "uplifting Stevie Wonder song by numbers" feel, and though I'm not in love with the song (after the introduction, it kinda feels like the same decent one minute song played on repeat for another four minutes), it's presented in such an earnestly happy way that I can't feel too much ire towards it. "For Your Love" is a good deal better, tapping into the "mystical love song" style he had cultivated on FFF and Songs and had dropped almost instantly thereafter, and had it been written and recorded 20 years earlier it would probably be close to a classic (as is, the keyboards are a little too conventional and bland for that to happen). The chorus of this one, in particular, is really nice.

So that's five songs. The other eight, as mentioned, are mostly ok in the final product, and would be better if they'd been stripped down further. I guess I'm less thrilled with "Edge of Eternity" (where Stevie's attempts to sound sexy sound comical in places) or "Take the Time Out" (which is as generic of a Stevie "up with everybody and that means you!!!" anthem as one could have) than I'd prefer, but even these two have their genuine charms ("Edge of Eternity" has a strong horn part and a nice bassline, and "Take the Time Out" is a decent piece of pop funk in the verses before it becomes cheesy in the chorus). "Rain Your Love Down" tries so hard to sound like a 90s version of a Songs track that it almost succeeds; the bass, the drums, the mix of keyboards, and the vocal melody + chorus are all on a B or B+ level rather than the A level that would have been typical of Songs, but that's not a terrible level to reach, and the song gets the album off to a good start. "Taboo to Love" is a perfectly decent ballad that sounds somewhat like a poor man's version of "Visions" but is nice regardless, with very tasteful orchestration. "Sensuous Whisper" is basically a slightly jazzier version of the kind of mid-tempo funk-popper that "Rain Your Love Down" sought to be, and while it would have been WAY better at 3 or 4 minutes rather than 6, it's not the worst filler in the world.

The album ends, after a high point with "For Your Love," with three tracks that each strongly exemplify the album's general sense that this material would have been better in the earlier era that it tries to emulate. "Cold Chill" is an anthemic funk-stomper with a solid beat and a nice chorus, but good grief, 6:53 is WAY too long for this, even if it gets filled with gimmicks like the goofy female backing vocals that pop up during the second minute. "Sorry" has a frantic urgency to it that makes the track work really well as a penultimate "rush to the finish" track for an album, even if the song is basically a bunch of well-sung rambling over a good chord sequence that's played over and over again, and I'm glad it's here. And finally, the closing title track strikes me as one that thinks it belongs to a better album than it actually belongs to (mostly because of the army of backing vocalists meant to give the sense that Stevie's message here is the most important ever written), but the big rising chorus is impressive in its self-assuredness, and I like the song plenty overall (the ending series of people saying "Conversation Peace" over the song's beat is pretty silly, though).

No, I don't think this album is especially impressive, but I am glad that Stevie at least took a shot at making this type of album again before he got too old to make such an effort seem ridiculous. Sadly, this album largely exhausted him creatively, and it would be another ten years before he'd put out another (less successful) studio album. If you're a giant fan of his classic material, and if Hotter Than July and later albums left you cold, this is definitely worth a couple of serious listens; I'd be surprised if somebody nowadays ended up thinking it was anywhere near the level of its spiritual predecessors, but hey, I've heard and read stranger opinions than that.

This album, recorded in Japan (with an orchestra) and released in 1995, plays things safe to an almost maddening degree. His pre-adult period is represented only by "My Cherie Amour" and "Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I'm Yours," and I definitely wouldn't have minded if one or two other tracks from this era had made it in. The material from his prime period reflects the general consensus of the period (not from smart fans, but from casual fans who know maybe 10 Stevie songs in total) by completely ignoring Music of My Mind and FFF, while Songs gets a whopping 7 tracks (Talking Book and Innervisions each only get 2, and you can probably guess which ones without even looking it up). From his post-prime, Hotter Than July gets 2 tracks ("Master Blaster (Jammin')" and "Rocket Love"), In Square Circle gets "Overjoyed" (which sounds just as strong as anything else on this album, and manages to stand out in the process), and Conversation Peace (the album being supported on this tour) gets 2 ("Tomorrow Robins Will Sing" and "For Your Love"). The rest is split between mega-hits from compilations and soundtracks ("I Just Called to Say I Love You" from Woman in Red, "Ribbons in the Sky" from Original Musiquarium, "Stay Gold" from the movie "The Outsiders") and a handful of new songs that at least give some necessity to the album. Of the new tracks, the opening "Dancing to the Rhythm" is the most interesting (even at 7 minutes long, it has enough in the way of rhythmic and melodic twists to make it fun for the duration), but both the instrumental "Stevie Ray Blues" and "Ms. and Mr. Little Ones" have their charms (even if the former is somewhat of a throwaway in terms of length).

As for the overall performances, well, Stevie's band is thoroughly competent, but everything is weirdly sterile, and the presence of the orchestra doesn't really do much to give much of a lift to the overall sound. The end result is a bunch of alternate versions of classic songs that I like somewhere between 70% and 80% as much as their originals, and while I won't mind hearing these versions from time to time, I don't see how I'll ever listen to this again. Unless you're a serious fan, don't bother.

I like the big self-important dramatic opener "If Your Love Cannot be Moved," and I like the big self-important closing title track, which goes on and on and ends with an extended drum solo that works well in context. I like the moody jazzy balladry of "Moon Blue," even if making it go almost 7 minutes might have been a mistake. I like the ballad "Shelter in the Rain," despite the fact it sounds like something 70s Stevie could have written in 5 minutes (I should note that it was written about Syreeta Wright, who died of cancer prior to this album's release). And, well ... I don't really dislike anything else, and I won't mind hearing material from here once in a blue moon, but man I've listened to this album a whole bunch of times and it's been a chore to come up with any insights beyond mildly liking the album as a whole. This album's purpose is for a Stevie fan to hear it once, go "Woo Stevie is back," put down money for it, listen to it a couple of more times and generally not dislike it, and then completely forget about it for the rest of time. And that's how I expect it will be for me; it certainly doesn't mar his career or his overall impact, but it definitely doesn't help it either (which, frankly, is a reasonable way to sum up everything he did after Songs in the Key of Life).