Stevie Wonder (and my Dad) are Serious Fellows.
A look back at Stevie’s seriously great album “Talking Book.”
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Stevie Wonder reminds me a lot of my Dad. My Dad, who immigrated to America from Haiti as a young student in the ’60s, likes to play the role of the goofy guy a lot (me too, I guess). He tells corny jokes and makes light commentary on almost any situation. He’s always glad to see you and usually has a smile on his face. But if you didn’t really know him, you might tend to write him off as an unserious fellow.
But you’d be wrong. Dead wrong. My Dad is one of the most contemplative people you’ll ever meet. And he’s brilliant. He taught me and my sibs to want to know how things work. He taught us how to work with our hands as well as our minds. He taught us to love good, high-quality music. Beethoven, Mozart, or fantastic Haitian music was always on his turntable or reel-to-reel. As an engineer, he taught me to love Mathematics. Science. In practicing his own philosophies, he taught me to be curious about the universe unfolding in front of us and also to see that there was Math right there, laying out a blueprint and a road map for understanding all the wonders this life offers.
If you’ll forgive the obvious segue, Mr. Stevland Morris Wonder qualifies as one of those wonders. He’s an artist who first arrived in my Dad’s time, and like my Dad, there’d be folks (maybe today’s younger set) who would want to write Stevie off as an unserious fellow. If all that you were hip to were his current appearances on television or his schmaltzy pop smashes like “I Just Called to Say I Love You” or “Overjoyed,” it might be easy to do that.
But you’d be wrong. Dead wrong. You’d have to ignore five of the baddest works of musical art ever created in the history of humankind. Right up there with Ellington, Chopin, and Davis. These works of art would be:
- Music of My Mind
- Talking Book
- Innervisions
- Fulfillingness’ First Finale
- Songs in The Key of Life
Recognize, these five albums were released in a supernova of sheer genius between 1972 and 1976. You couldn’t turn on the Grammy Awards during that time and not hear “…and Record of the Year goes to…Stevie Wonder.” These records came out so strong and fast that they felt like a blur to those who experienced them.
I want to share a deeper dive into one of those five albums, my favorite: Talking Book.
But first, it’s essential to understand where Stevie was coming from…
The Precursor to Genius
Stevie’s career was forged in the pop music hit-making juggernaut that was Motown Records. Motown’s early promotion of the 12-year-old child prodigy Stevie Wonder, who lost his sight shortly after birth, was as a young version of another unsighted musical genius, Ray Charles.
Stevie’s repertoire centered around singable, danceable pop ditties like “If You Really Love Me,” “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” (Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign theme, by the way), and “For Once In My Life.” These are all nice, strong, typical Motown hit songs.
But in early 1971, fellow label mate and pop star Marvin Gaye upended the Motown hit-making apple cart and ignited the musical world with his critical masterpiece “What’s Going On” (an album I’ve bought six copies of if you didn’t know). Gaye’s album, drawing inspiration from other pop icons turned social commentators like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, cast a spotlight on the profound turmoil society was experiencing — marked by the assassinations of MLK and RFK, the Vietnam War, and the corrupt Nixon administration.
Marvin’s collaborator and friend, Stevie Wonder, by then 21 years old and a veteran of the game, had his own light to shine on society. With Marvin’s leap showing the way, in March of 1972, Stevie released “Music of My Mind.” Not only was Stevie ready to espouse his ideas about the world, but he was also ready to introduce a whole set of sounds not heard in most of the American songbook: the sounds of the synthesizer.
Note: If you *really* want to understand “Talking Book,” you might want to start with “Music of My Mind,” especially the tour de force opener “I Love Everything About You” or the hauntingly beautiful opus “Superwoman.”
The Flame is Lit
Eight months after releasing Music of My Mind, Stevie dropped another bomb in the form of his album titled Talking Book. But you know how sometimes, when you’re trying to build a fire, it’s not clear if the flame you light will take? Those are the first three tracks of this album.
Talking Book opens on familiar ground, harkening back to Stevie’s prototypical AM radio-friendly, middle-of-the-road sound with “You Are the Sunshine of My Life.” It works in its own right as a beautiful, simple tune that offends no one. I still enjoy it.
But on the next track, “Maybe Your Baby,” the spark set by “Sunshine” leaps into flame. The vibe connects directly back to where Stevie left off on Music of My Mind and leans into the urgency of Marvin’s What’s Going On. It’s a gritty, No Mr. Nice Guy, bluesy tale of infidelity. It’s not a pop song; it’s all too real. Note the insanely pulsing rhythm driven by Steve’s deft synthesizer innovations. And the lyric—the lyrics, as Steve bemoans a betrayal at the hands of his love…
In the mornin’ when I’ve got heartache
I can’t call up the doctor for help’
Cause the only person that could ever do me any good
Is steppin’ out with my best friend
He continues into his descent:
I feel like I’m slippin’ deeper
Slippin’ deeper into myself
And I, I can’t take it
This stuff is scarin’ me to death
Until his moment of clarity, spoken in second person:
Maybe your baby done made some other plans.
A six-minute plus jaunt, it’s a long way from “My Cherie Amour”. And coming on the heels of Music of My Mind, you feel like stuff is about to explode.
If you’re a fan of Prince, you might hear in the extended vamps of this track the blueprint for the extended vamps the Purple One would unleash a decade-plus later…
However, on Talking Book’s next track, the flame flickers a bit. While “You and I” is pretty, it’s unremarkable. (No shade to the thousands who shared their first wedding dance to this tune). If you’re listening, you might think, “Ok, yes, this album sounds nice. But come on, Ron—is it great?”
Hang with me, though. The promise of Talking Book returns with track 4, “Tuesday Heartbreak.”
Ignition
Tuesday Heartbreak breaks out with some of that innovative synthesizer I alluded to earlier. It welcomes (the recently departed) saxophonist David Sanborn in an arrangement that Sanborn would reprise a couple of years later in this tune’s musical sibling, “Young Americans” by David Bowie (upon which Sanborn also completely lit up with his horn). Tuesday Heartbreak’s a damn good track, and nothing like Stevie had ever offered before.
Following Tuesday Heartbreak and closing out side one was “You’ve Got It Bad Girl,” another lyrical and textual masterpiece in an album of masterpieces.
These two tracks are a spotlight of Wonder’s instrumental range on this album (and throughout his “Classic Period”). In addition to keys and his trademark harmonica, Stevie also plays most of the drums. Most notably, Stevie introduced new synthesizer textures to his music, providing many of these tracks’ guitar and bass lines. Finally, a good deal of this synthesizer work involved mastering a huge, complex synthesizer named “TONTO” that occupied a whole room!
Collabos Galore
More fire in collaboration occurs on “Looking for Another Pure Love.” On this track, ace guitarist Jeff Beck of The Yardbirds fame graces another Stevie tale lamenting a lost love, providing deliciously subtle guitar licks to frame Stevie’s equally poignant lyrics.
(Man. Stevie must’ve been put through the wringer in his love life before this record…lyrically, the lament on Talking Book is on 10!)
Back to Beck. As almost an afterthought, Stevie wrote a quick song for his buddy Jeff in a jam session in the months before the album. But once Berry Gordy of Motown happened upon the demo, he insisted that Wonder record the song himself. The result was a song so strong that you cannot mention Talking Book without speaking of it as the album’s central work: the bombastic, in-your-face “Superstition.” It’s a track Jeff Beck supposedly never got over releasing first.
In an effort to compensate for keeping his song, Stevie wrote Beck two new songs for his album “Blow by Blow:” the instrumentals “Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers” and “Thelonius.” Listen to these tracks, too; they ain’t no joke…
Of course, you know Superstition; it’s one of Stevie’s best-known works—deservedly so. This song shook up so many folks that Mick Jagger approached Stevie and asked him to tour with the Stones. Stevie took him up on it and, in doing so, smashed through the arbitrary lines of programming genres known as American radio.
Message in the Music
While Talking Book doesn’t eclipse his buddy Marvin’s album in terms of social commentary, Stevie does land an in-your-face Mike Tyson-level haymaker called “Big Brother” that stands head and shoulders above all in terms of revolutionary statements—naming enemies such as Cointelpro and the Nixonian mindset.
Big Brother breaks it all down in these lyrics:
Your name is Big Brother.
You say that you got me all in your notebook.
Writing it down everyday.
Your name is I’ll see ya.
I’ll change if you vote me in as a pres.
The President of your soul.I live in the ghetto.
You just come to visit me ‘round election time.
The interplay of synthesizer, African drum, harmonica, and voice in this track’s biting commentary works up to a crescendo that decidedly “ends” the antagonist:
My name is secluded.
We live in a house the size of a matchbox.
Roaches live with us, wall to wall.You’ve killed all our leaders.
I don’t even have to do nothin’ to you.
You’ll cause your own country to fall.
Though the tune’s inspiration was the book “1984,” written by George Orwell in 1949, the oppressive environment depicted in the book applied in many ways in the early 1970s, and could be said to be prescient concerning the present day.
True to Himself
All through the “Classic Period” albums cited earlier, Stevie’s synthesizer innovations, and in-your-face lyrical statements, he never forgets the lessons learned at Motown, providing hit songs and accessible ballads; the tracks “You and I” and “Blame it on the Sun” on Talking Book certainly testify to that.
My Dad had a saying I heard many times growing up if and when I would do a half-a**ed job sweeping the kitchen or cutting the lawn. He would send me right back out to finish the job, saying, “A Good Job is a Thorough Job.”
One time, I grumbled back, “Is a thorough job a good job?” He answered, “Not necessarily.” In other words, you can be thoroughly bad…
Nobody had to tell Stevie anything like that, as he delivered a thorough finish to his masterpiece. Talking Book closes with another ballad-based track, “I Believe When I Fall in Love.” Slow and pretty at the start, the synthesizer builds in, layer after layer, into a fitting, energetic statement of great weight.
A statement that sets up Stevie’s subsequent work of genius, “Innervisions.” On Innervisions, Stevie builds on the technical prowess he has mastered on Talking Book and delves into deeper philosophical topics, including Transcendental Meditation, False Prophets, and the Power of the Mind.
My Dad didn’t dig American R&B music as much as I do, but I do know one thing for sure. He always thought Stevie Wonder was one serious fellow.
Ron Cadet, VP of User Interface and Experience at Brainscape, specializes in crafting exceptional user experiences across both the engineering and media domains. Highlights of Ron’s diverse career include programming top-rated online radio for MTV Networks, designing patented UI frameworks for View, and engineering innovative flashcard learning apps for Brainscape, each adhering to an underlying principle — “Build user experiences on purposes people believe in, solutions that advance these purposes, and interfaces that enable people to apply the solutions. These user experiences may not only elevate the human experience but might also redefine it.”
Ron spends his Sundays writing about the pursuit of exceptional user experiences through UI/UX design and engineering in “Frames,” general life and work principles in “The Blueprint,” and human interest topics in “Ruminations.” He also co-hosts a variety of pods with “The New Obsidian.”
