What happened to Stevie Wonder?

As to quality, anyone's guess. Hasn't released a truly good album since Hotter than July IMO.

They're too cool to not be divided into equal time between years. But with Ray Charles's death we need someone to fill in as the next cool black blind man (up there with Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, James Earl Jones in the Sandlot, etc).

http://www.zshare.net/audio/541473879b3888ff/

song is kind of nice but the idea of autotuning a guy who sings like Stevie Wonder - i.e., a guy who's capable of doing autotune without any mechanical assistance & has been doing so for decades - is really stupid

Unrelated to that...Has any heard Bobbito dj one of his "Wonderful" events--obscure Stevie tracks all night, or so I heard? He's gonna be back doing so in DC Sunday night and I figure it could be fun. Always liked Bobbito's writing and figure his dj'ing must be good too.

Yeah I went to one of those in new york, maybe 7 years ago? Fantastic night -I imagine it will be sitll.

Still around 5-6 years to go until the next album, I guess?

Oh well, he will never be essential again, but his two last studio albums of new material have both been quite nice and way better than "I Just Called To Say I'm a Part Time Lover".

geir joeks. "part-time lover" is a great song btw.

so is i just called to say i love you.

I wouldn't say so. But it should be noted that his 1985 "In Square Circle" also contained some great songs such as "Stranger On The Shore Of Love", "Overjoyed" and best of all "Whereabouts". So it wasn't all bad. And 1987's "Characters" also had its moments.

its bland schmaltz. but melodically/structurally attractive bland schmaltz.

My main problem about "I Just Called...." (and I loved it at 13 btw) is that it lacks the key element that, for me, made Stevie Wonder so great in the 70s: The chords!

At his best, Stevie Wonder is a genius at putting interesting chords in sequence that you thought would never work, and yet it does. "Too High" from the "Innervisions" album is perhaps one of the best examples.
However, "I Just Called" is based on rather traditonal three-piece-chords. It worked perfectly for The Byrds, but you kind of expect something a bit more harmonically adventurous from Stevie Wonder. And on "I Just Called" you didn't get that.

geir otm - anybody who's ever looked at the "isn't she lovely" chord chart can only stand in awe: it's a master class in how to make I-IV-V deep and complicated and tricky and interesting (the permutations of the tonic alone, it's like there's four in a row where most people would be all 'I gotta go to another chord now'). it's weird that Wonder seemed to lose interest in his own process, although I imagine he might say "look, I did all I could really do in that direction and I just wanted to play simple songs that made people happy" - which, y'know, putting words in his mouth here but that seems like a completely valid thing to do, just less interesting to me & other people who like getting their minds blown by tricky chords and stuff

btw that clip is hot stuff Jordan

He was already making complex songs that made people happy, though. It's not exactly like he'd turned into some sort of fringe artist at that point rather than a beloved hit machine.

You know, "You Are The Sunshine Of My Life" was seemingly very simple and straightforward too, and surely has lots of haters. But harmonically, it's about 100 times more complex than "I Just Called To Say I Love You".

mentioned in passing in a book i'm editing and i was mildly ambushed by his birthname (the index tool said "hardaway" but i thought i'd remembered "judkins")

anyway straightening this out by looking it up online (theyre both correct, as is “morris” and i guess also “wonder” lol) i was ambushed even more by the fact that he's still only 75

So we're talking about 31 years old when he did the middle-aged Woman in Red soundtrack.

A little older, I think, but not much. And his run of Talking Book, Innervisions, Fulfillingness' First Finale, and Songs in the Key Life was when he was 22-26, which is always wild to consider.

I’ve been meaning to do a deep dive into his post-Hotter Than July music. It’s not on the same level but I get the feeling from those who defend those years that it has at least an hour’s worth of keepers.

I can think of a few bands that had insane runs like that but Stevie was just one guy. A guy who by the way was doing everything on his own. Hard to think of anything that compares, outside of maybe Todd Rundgren's run in the first half of the 70s. But Stevie's music seems more universal, appealing on so many different levels, clearly the work of someone who's just better at this than most people could ever hope to be. They're so good I can't even blame him for his soft retirement after Songs in the Key of Life, I am guessing he knew he just couldn't do any better and didn't have any need to.

His albums after 1985 are too long but not one of them -- not one of them, let me repeat -- is less than excellent.

tbf he made "the jazz soul of little stevie" (excellent title) when he was 12

His albums after 1985 are too long but not one of them -- not one of them, let me repeat -- is less than excellent.

I believe you 100% but for those of us who won’t realistically take the time to do a full deep dive, have you ever done one of your S/D type blogposts about latter-day Stevie? Would love a curated mix!

I remember the 'Characters' record was a big record for me back in the late 80's...was he a Scientologist then?

FWIW, I personally love In Square Circle, esp this track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjmyMQ00XrE

Wow, he played this song live pre-COVID! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUelb0EYfhU

What lets down Stevie in 1985 and 1987 is his increasingly cramped rhythmic sense; for the guy who invented polyrhythmic R&B crossover in the '70s, it's a shock to realize how drum machines and sequencers inhibited him. Conversation Peace and A Time for Love get past it.

Jungle Fever is the Stevie album I listen to the most, not least because it contains my fav song of his (Chemical Love)

Also the swing in 'new jack swing' really comes out on that album. Not in the sense of jazz but it seems like so many of the sounds are magnetised to the beat and thus fly joyfully around the sonic picture in this skipping swinging fashion, as they unstick themselves from one beat and shoot onto the next, like the bassline on "Queen in the Black" (and indeed the song's intro, which could be the start of a UK garage track), or much of "Each Other's Throat" (the main musical hook there is a thrust of super fast arpeggiated white noise a la the intro to the rap on "Black or White"; Stevie must've been really big on using the technology as a display for the humanly impossible). Even "Chemical Love" manages to be really 'funky' in the most unassuming way - the track could stay still a bit more and be the Ibiza chillout tune it almost could be but the bassline is wobbling all over the place, giving the song its choppy feel. Anyway yes I think his rhythmic sense is on good display throughout. Also the title track one of the most infectious pieces of bubblegum of the era.

A couple of years ago I planned a poll about R&B stars who emerged in the 60s-70s (and who aren't MJ or Prince) making swingbeat albums and tentatively wrote a bunch of capsule reviews, fleshing out some of what I just wrote there, but then my laptop died. Would still like to do that as a thread sometime tho.

I loooove "Chemical Love." Booming post.

I guess the better question is, why aren’t people re-evaluating all the good, overlooked music he made later on the way they’ve done for any of his peers?