Switched on Pop - The virtuosity of Stevie Wonder

Episode Date: October 22, 2024

Stevie Wonder may be our modern day Mozart. A child prodigy, he joined Motown as a preadolescent where he was marketed as “Little” Stevie Wonder. He wowed audiences with his virtuosic command of the piano, harmonica, drums and of course, vocals. At just 13, he had his first number one hit “Fingertips Part II.” It was an unusual chart topper, featuring a live recording of mostly improvised music with Wonder switching between instruments as the audience cheered him on. But Wonder’s musical potential was far more than a gimmick.  In the 1970s, Wonder broke free from the confines of his initial recording contract, securing his artistic and financial freedom. Between 1971 and 1976, during what is now known as his "classic period," he released five of the most iconic albums in popular music, beginning with Music of My Mind and culminating in Songs in the Key of Life. These albums showcased his musical genius and included timeless songs that have become part of the modern pop canon, touching on themes of love, heartbreak, justice, and spirituality. Few child prodigies fulfill their potential as profoundly as Stevie Wonder. With the help of Wesley Morris, NYT critic and host of the spectacular audio series The Wonder of Stevie, Switched on Pop looks back on some of Stevie Wonder’s strongest compositions, exploring what makes him our contemporary musical maestro. Songs Discussed: Stevie Wonder - "Girl Blue" Stevie Wonder - "Superwoman (Where Were You When I Needed You)" Stevie Wonder - "Superstition" Stevie Wonder - "Golden Lady" Stevie Wonder - "Isn't She Lovely" Stevie Wonder - "I Wish" Stevie Wonder - "Sir Duke" Stevie Wonder - "As" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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on records. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie

Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. The other night I saw,

I think the most talented pop star who's still touring, an absolute bucketless kind of show. I saw Stevie Wonder at Madison Square Garden. I'm so jealous. I don't even know if I can do this episode with you. I'm so jealous. Stevie's like holding court at MSG with 30 plus musicians behind him. Wow. He's got a full string section, horns, multiple percussionists, multiple keyboard players, backup singers. In this economy? I think Stevie can afford it. And, you know, he's just like singing his heart out and preaching platitudes at this concert series that was booked last minute. He called it, sing your song as we fix our nation's broken heart.

We've got to come together for the good of all. You know what? You all have inspired me, meaning this nation has inspired me with so many songs because I just believe. And I believe. I mean, I don't generally believe in I mean, I don't generally believe in the power of pop stars to change the world, but if anyone could, it might be Stevie Wonder. When he sings about love, when he sings about all the problems of the world,

when he sings about love healing those problems, I believe him. I think there's something totally unique about Stevie Wonder's place in pop music. You know, he was a child prodigy. And I feel like every couple of years I see some publication is like, oh, there's another child prodigy who's like a wizard on their instrument and they're going to be the biggest thing in the world. And then they just like never are able to extend their musical talents to reach the whole world. There's something about the language of music that like if you get too into it, it can become insular. And you forget how to speak to people who maybe don't speak music on the same level. Stevie is the exact opposite.

You know, I went to chat GPT and I was like, hey, give me a list of musical child prodigies who have achieved popular fame. It was like, number one. Mozart. Correct. Number two, Stevie Wonder. I mean, if he keeps it up, he might dethrone Wolfgang. Yeah, no kidding. I mean, he started piano at age seven, then picked up harmonica and drums at nine.

He sang lead in his church, studied classical piano and theory at the Michigan School for the blind. and was discovered by Ronnie White of The Miracles to join Motown, where he had his first hit single at age 12, and on many of his recordings, he plays all the instruments. And I think what really stands out about his music is that he has this way of incorporating more advanced musical concepts into popular songs using parts of music theory that just, like, otherwise don't fit into the world of pop.

I thought it would be fun to celebrate Stevie Wonder together by listening back to some of his songs where he merges his virtuosity with incredibly infectious pop music. I'm a huge fan of Stevie Wonder, have been forever. And I feel like there's a lot of ink spilled on this iconic musician, but this feels like a fresh way to approach some really familiar songs. So I'm excited to maybe hear some tracks that we think we know well in a new light. Maybe I can lean on you for some of the advanced graduate studies, work of Stevie Wonder's musical talents. But to start with just the music 101 of Stevie Wonder, I feel like we should listen to the song, Isn't She Lovely? Isn't She Lovely from 1976 off of songs in the Key of Life, First Impressions? Definitely a song that if you don't pay attention,

to the very beginning, you're going to think this is just a typical love song between, you know, two adults. And then when you hear the sound of a baby crying in the very beginning, you're like, wait a minute. This is an ode to his newborn daughter. And when you hear it like that, it's like, oh, man, it just has a whole other level of sweetness and joy to it. It is sweet. It's a simple song. It has these very basic sort of chords. And yet it's a great example of a song, which is way more than it seems.

Not only do you have these great interludes of the but da, but da, but da da da da, but da, but da, which, you know, when you go to learn a Stevie Wonder song, sometimes you're like, oh, I'm going along. Things are going great. And they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on. How do I do this part? I mean, these chords are simple for a Stevie Wonder song, but they're still pretty complex for 99% of pop music. Yeah, they're not bad. The reason why I want to start with this song, though, is that this is a great example. of him just kind of frankly showing off how strong of an improviser he is,

especially on the harmonica. He is one of these players on the harmonica. You hear two notes. It is undeniably Stevie Wonder playing. The majority of this song is an extended three-minute-plus harmonica solo. Insane. In which he just revels in the bliss of his daughter and just keeps on spitting out amazing jazz

and blues riffs. Begins with the melody, embellishes it, and then starts to explore. The phrasing gets way more complex. Goes on and on and on his harmonica. Not just a harmonica, Charlie. A chromatic harmonica. Ah, yes. Most harmonicas come tuned to a single key, potentially limiting what you can play.

His harmonica can play every single note. But, whoa, I feel like you're underselling this. Charlie. My four-year-old can pick up a regular diatonic harmonica and play like a nice sounding chord. Bob Dylan can strap one on to his neck while he's playing acoustic guitar and basically just go ham on that thing and it sounds good enough. And no shade on the classic diatonic harmonic. Incredible instrument, but a chromatic harmonica is much harder to play and master. It has this sliding bar that you control with your thumb that literally takes the entire harmonica up a Semi-tone, which allows you to play all the keys of the chromatic scale, but requires a much

higher level of practice and finesse and dexterity. Yeah, and I feel like the way that Stevie plays the harmonica puts him in the upper echelon of being like one of the great horn players, but his horn is the harmonica. He can hit anything. He can bend notes, and he shows off as incredible phrasing and harmonic sensibility. harmonic sensibility on harmonica. Anyway. It's kind of obnoxious, honestly.

It's like he's this amazing vocalist, composer, drummer, pianist, and chromatic harmonica virtuoso. It's like, come on, Stevie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so that's the 101. Let's go to Stevie Wonder 201 with the song, You Are the Sunshine of My Life. It opens with the strangest scale. What? How strange is that opening?

He's playing the whole tone scale. It's like, that is out, that is angular, that is some strange stuff. I always think of the whole tone scale as almost more theoretical than applicable. Where all the notes are equally spaced between each other, it's like not a very pleasant sound. Like, it's more associated for me with like impressionist composers. like Claudebusy, or the universe expanding melodies of Thelonious Monk. Who else on this planet has ever put this sound into a pop song other than Stevie Wonder? Musicologist Nate Sloan, what the heck is this whole tone scale? What is it doing here?

It's a mysterious musical object. It's a scale, unlike the major and minor scale that's composed of symmetrical intervals. So each interval is the same. It's a whole tone that is two semitone. So you go from one, whole tone, whole tone, whole tone, whole tone, and then you arrive back at the note you started. Yeah. You don't know what to do with this scale because it doesn't present the same kind of harmonic options that the major or minor scale does. It just kind of sits there. Usually it's used as kind of a novelty song, like when you're going into like a dream or a flashback in a movie. Most composers don't really know what to do with it in a sonic context.

So it's pretty unusual, fun to encounter it in a song that is so cheesy. Is that fair? Yeah, of course. It's like, what's it doing there? You're the sunshine of my life. I think of this sound as on one level, almost just mathematical. Like someone was like what happens if you keep stacking these whole tones on top of each other? Okay, that's interesting.

This is what you get to. It doesn't feel like a scale that a person would naturally sing. And yet, I feel like one of the emotional qualities, though, that the scale gives us is this feeling of uplift and brightness. Like, you keep rising up. Bear with me. It's kind of like watching the sunrise and the sun is ascending and you're staring. into it and it's like way too bright and it's not good for your eyes. I feel like the sunshine of my life is this bright ascending scale?

Sure. Or Stevie's just having fun with us and somehow is mixing this sound, which doesn't really have a place in pop music with a really cheesy, sweet love song and only Stevie can pull it off. Either way, every time I hear this song from now, I'm going to think of that. whole tone scale in the intro. That's really fun. Okay, Stevie Wonder 301.

Let's go to the song, Golden Lady. This song for me is a master class in harmony, where Stevie Wonder is working out all his chords. And just from the verse right here, we get this ascending set of chords. It starts on our home chord, an E flat major nine. ascends up to an F minor nine, up to a G minor nine, and then this A minor nine, core that's not really in the key. Charlie, that's the start of a whole tone scale. No. It's back.

These chords ascending and they're a little crunchy, a little complex. I love it. It's like one of the nerdiest episodes we've ever done. This is so fun. Well, and then we get to the chorus, and we just like, completely. completely reject the harmonic world that he's established. Leave the key of E-flat major and just kind of, I don't know how he does this, because this is beyond my harmonic sensibility.

Just like goes to the key of G minor. And rather than ascending, now everything is descending. So it takes us into this new harmonic domain from the major to the minor, from the ascending to the descending. That's not enough for Stevie. Because as this song slowly fades out, Stevie's got to up the ante. He doesn't modulate the song just once.

He just keeps modulating up and up and up. Ooh, modulation. But he's not done. We're going to go higher. It's like the object of his affection is so bright and golden and beautiful that she transcends harmony. That's so hard to do. Yeah.

It's like Beyonce's love on top. top, but, you know, 40 years before. So much of popular music is owed to the sounds of Stevie Wonder, and you could just keep going up and up in your studies from 101 classes to 201 classes to 301 classes. Nate, you have a PhD. You have a terminal degree. What is the graduate study level of Stevie Wonder for you?

At my institution, it's the 500 level classes. Oh. So we're going to skip four. Jump right to five. Okay. Because I feel like a song that brings all of these elements together is Sir Duke. Oh, yeah. I feel like this is one of the first Stevie tunes I fell in love with because, you know, I was a young jazz head.

Yeah. Stevie was kind of my introduction to the wider world of music beyond the hermetic world of jazz. I remember my piano teacher had a poster of the Stevie album, Inner Visions. And I was like, huh, Stevie Wonder is cool, interesting. And then I heard Sir Duke and he's like shouting out all these jazz legends, you know. So Bacy, Count Basie, Glenn Miller, Satchmo, Louis Armstrong, and then Ella, that's Ella, Fitzgerald, and Sir Duke, Duke, Ellington. So really cool to hear this roll call of jazz legends in this song. I think musically he's also putting himself into this legendary group,

if not in the time when he was working on songs in the Key of Life, the album. But when I saw him at Madison Square Garden, he was behind this giant bandstand where he had basically an orchestra like Duke Ellington would have had. And, of course, he was playing piano and singing, but just as much he was conducting the band. He was improvising which song he would go into. switching things up constantly and forcing the band to follow his lead. And so in many ways, I kind of feel like Stevie Wonder is a descendant in the musical heritage, certainly from Sir Duke.

I like that. It's not a jazz song per se, though it does start with a very jazzy intro. It's just a high hat playing the swing pattern. And we've got this hyper-syncopated horn line. But from just that amount of information, this could go into being like a jazz thing. That could be the head. There could be a bunch of improvisation.

Of course, we eventually get lyrical material that makes a way more contemporary pop music. But it swings. It's got a horn line. Pretty jazzy. And when we move into the verse, it becomes more in the language of soul and R&B that Stevie's known for. But harmonically, there's still a lot of jazz in these chord chains. You describe this song as jazzy, but not jazz. And then he sings, music is a language we all understand.

I feel like maybe that's the point of this song. It kind of crosses time and space and style. And it's very complex in some ways, but it's also so apprehensible. I love the chords when he's singing this, you know, a language we all understand. The chords are more of this chromatic motion that we've been here. again and again. B major, G sharp minor, down chromatically to G, down chromatically again to F sharp. And then when we move into the pre-chorus, he ups the ante of this chromatic motion. This is such a crazy moment. He's like, with an equal opportunity, we're still in the verse for all to sing,

dance and clap their hands and we're just moving down chromatically and we keep on going but just because a record has a groove don't make it in the groove and he does again but you can tell right away at letter a when the people start to move it's just it's like so if i just simplify that we're going i mean at the beginning of the song he says music is a world with in itself a language yes right And he's kind of showing us all of the notes available to us. It's something we've heard over and over. There's like really nerdy, theoretical, complex stuff happening in the background. But at the surface level, it's just like fun, funky, melodic, accessible.

That's such a fascinating mix to me. And what a flex to say, just because your record has a groove, as in like there's grooves written into the vinyl record doesn't mean that it actually has a groove. He's saying, but my record right here, with all of this funky, chromatic stuff that probably doesn't fit in Tournamental pop

song, this thing does have a groove. Whoa. Charlie, I never understood what he was saying there. You literally just blew my mind. I just was like, yeah, groove, groove, but there's some wordplay

here, what? The record groove and the musical groove. Yep. Whoa, I'm shook. Stevie. And yet we haven't even gotten to the most sort of jaw-dropping part of this song yet.

This instrumental interlude after the chorus. Perhaps the original pop drop. That is so fire. It's one of the most just satisfying moments in music. Just this winding, syncopated line. But again,

he undercuts it with the These exclamations. In some ways, my favorite moment of that whole thing is when he laughs, ha ha ha, ha, you know, right in the middle. He's like, he's so delighted at this line he's constructed for everyone to play. It's like, I don't know that. It's that combination of like, of rigor and intellect and technical virtuosity and then just like pure unbridled joy. That is so rare to have that combination. And he literally makes all of us feel that joy, right? He's singing over and over at the end. Like, you can feel it all over.

Come on, people. Let's feel it all over. Just like that joy that he is expressing, it's embedded in the harmony. It's embedded in the melody. He's doing all kinds of things that don't really want to fit into a pop record. And he yet is able to get an entire stadium of people to sing this quite sophisticated, chromatic, syncopated horn line in unison together. It just total joy. And so ever since going to this concert, I have just been relishing in the music of Stevie Wonder. I mean, something that I'm frequently doing, but I've been going even deeper in the last couple of days.

And it led me to this amazing podcast series called The Wonder of Stevie, hosted by Wesley Morris, a critic from the New York Times. And it includes just like the who's who of everybody celebrating Stevie Wonder. We got Questlove, Barack and Michelle Obama, Smokey Robinson, Janelle Monet. George Clinton. And it's all about Stevie's classic period from 1972 to 1976, where he puts out five of the best albums ever recorded in the history of popular music in just five years. And so I wanted to speak with Wesley about Stevie's talents and how he translates them so effectively into some of the best pop songs in history. My conversation with Wesley Morris right after the break. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it.

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The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. I'm Wesley Morris. I'm a critic at the New York Times. And I've hosted a show called The Wonder of Stevie. All right, Wesley, why is Stevie wonderful? holistically, I would start with just melody, right?

The show that we made is basically about the streak that happens from 1972 to 1976. These melodies, before 72, you could identify as, like, not originating from other sources, but drawing upon other influences, right? Where I'm coming from, you can hear other artists in a lot of those songs. Like, clearly there's a Beatles song. Clearly there's a sly in the family stone song. Or things that sound to me like they're in conversation with the people who made those songs. That is completely absent 72 to 76.

These are Stevie Wonder songs that sound only like they came from Stevie Wonder. A sort of stevieiness, if you will. Yeah. I mean, truly, honestly, like what we can identify retrospectively is stevieiness. I also think that there is something to how good those songs sounded coming out of a listener's mouth. Right? The songs were fun to sing. The songs were musically memorable.

I could probably get every Stevie Wonder song in, at least from 72, even, you know, maybe like 71 to 86 I could probably get in two notes. Wow. A million other things I'm sure we could go into, but melody is clearly one of his great talents. Is it a talent, though? Like, it just, I truly don't know. I've never written, I mean, when I was a kid, I was writing songs. I wrote a lot of songs as a kid. And they just would come to me, but frequently, I was trying to write songs that sounded like songs I liked that were just different enough from those songs to be mine. But they still, if I had, like, written them all the way and then recorded them, they would have been easily identifiable as sounding. like, for instance, Anna Motion's Obsession,

which is a song that I loved a lot and tried to copy. Yeah, I think that writing great melodies is kind of like a magic sleight of hand where great melodies

need to be simple, singable, memorable, and because of those qualities, we might think, oh, well, simple means they're not necessarily very, you know, it doesn't take genius

to come up with a simple melody, but, you know, we don't get Beethoven's 9th Symphony without a level of genius. And it's one of the simplest melodies that everybody on the planet can sing and is sung at the Olympics and is sung at, you know, great world events. And it was written for the service. Oh, yeah, totally. Instantly is what it is. And many of Stevie's melodies are, I think, this exact same quality.

What would you say are some of his other greatest talents? Talents. I mean, I think it's the ability to synthesize so many different sounds, right? this streak also doesn't happen these five albums they don't happen without stevie finding this synthesizer that is called tonto four of those five albums were made with malcolm cecil and robert margaleff these two guys who owned operated really understood the synthesizer called tonto and i feel like he was somebody who already was a synthesizer who just needed a piece of technology to realize what he already knew he could do. On many of these records, Stevie is often the sole player. He might bring in an extra player or two here or there, but there are many tracks where he is literally every single part, drums.

Just about, yes. And then the synthesizer fills in a lot of roles, whether it's as a bass instrument, as a lead instrument. And so he is multi-tracking himself on top of himself. also important when we're talking about what makes this man wonderful is that he really trusted people right he grew up learning how to make music at motown and you know he spent 10 years basically just you know almost 10 years watching people make some of the greatest music greatest american pop music ever foundational music but also understanding that like that is not that he didn't want that to be his approach right you're you're describing Barry Gordy's sort of like Fortist manufacturing method of writing hit songs where it was just every single day, funk brothers recording, multiple songwriters in the room, as many hits as possible, put up as many albums in a year as you possibly can. The kind of place that would cannibalize itself because some of the songs were so good and they just kept, like, heard it through the grapevine is a song so good that there were three different

versions just from Motown, right? Within like two years of each other. And so Stevie, is like watching all this happen and he's just like I love this this is really important to me I would not be who I am as this 20 year old person without learning any of these things but I also am me and I'm I'm ready to figure out what this would look like if I just did it myself like wrote my own songs and just played the instruments myself so you've already got a lot on the table here. Obviously, one of the greatest melodists of all time, a synthesizer, and obviously

we can use this term metaphorically because not only is he a master of the instrument the synthesizer really helped develop the synthesizer as a mainstay of popular music, he's obviously synthesizing so much different music. I love this metaphor. How was his talent nurtured as a young child and then as he proceeds into the world of Motown? Well, I mean, the famous story, is that he winds up at Motown's Hitzville USA offices. And he's with his mother. Lula Mae is, you know, there with him. He's playing, he's futzing around on some instruments.

And while the story, this is a myth, right? There's a lot of different versions of what actually happened. But the one we went with involved Barry being summoned during his lunch to come watch this kid play all these instruments. Yeah. He comes down and, you know, a few of the stories line up where Barry is sort of essentially unimpressed by what he is saying. He's like, oh, this kid is like banging on the drums. But at some point, it occurs to Barry that, like, there is something special happening here. And I think we need to figure out something to do with it. And essentially, he becomes

part of the Motown Review pretty quickly. Like, there's a contract drawn up. He's age 12. He's 12 years old, I think, when he goes out in the road and records and performs what winds up becoming the legendary fingertips and fingertips part two. Fingertips Part 2, I don't know where you stand on this, but definitely one of the most bizarre smash hits of all time, right? Yeah. It's almost like an accident where Stevie Wonder is ad-libbing to the crowd, a lot of call and

responds, a lot of the band trying to figure out, you can hear in the recording of Fingertips Part 2, but I think it's the basis being like, yo, what? Am I, am I getting up? Am I staying seated? What is that?

What key are we in? And it just turns into this really infectious moment, live moment between this kid and this audience. And he, Steve, you want to be a preacher. This is a blonde.

kid who wanted to preach, had all this musical talent, still wanted to get an education, right? Like the entire time he's at Motown, he is being tutored and going to the Michigan School for the blind. He's getting book learning. He's getting Motown learning. He's getting music biz learning, music making education. He's learning how to be on the road. He's learning how to be around adults, I think that the joy and the fun that you hear in this music is native to the person that he is. But like at

Motown, he was, I mean, he was a little bit of an asshole at Motown. Like a little asshole at Motown. Like playing pranks on people, tricking people into thinking that he could see, you know, there's a story that Dion Warwick tells where he gets one of the Shirelles

to tell Dion who's not a Motown artist, but they were out on tour together, that the red dress she had, he didn't like or something. It's in the, it's in the show. My details are a little. I know, I know the clip. But, you know, he was doing all kinds of little pranks like that, punking people all the time into thinking that he could see. He just really enjoyed being the kid at the company while also being frustrated that he wasn't being allowed to write his own songs when he knew he knew he could. So there was this tension at some point because also,

the albums they were, they was releasing an album a year from fingertips on. I mean, music of my mind, which begins what we're calling this classic period, is album 13. Oh my gosh. Which means that he, by 1972, is putting out like more than an album a year. Think about that. This kid basically was having elementary, middle, high school, and college happen in this compressed amount of time. He's getting a top-notch, multidisciplinary education. And of course, he's watching all these other artists succeed and fail within the Motown system

and can figure out for himself what worked, what didn't work, what sounded good, what didn't sound good, right? Cordia was ruthless. And if you were in, you were in, if you were out, you're out. And so he's watching all, yeah. But, you know, what's funny is, like, Barry is ruthless. There's so much ruthlessness happening in this company. He's also watching people like Marvin Gay, be frustrated with Barry's inability and the company's inability

or refusal to engage in the politics of the civil rights movement. Oh, yeah. The company just, there's so much tension about just respectability and what it is to be seen on television in front of a white audience. And so what's going on for Marvin Gay, he's got this inner turmoil that he's confronting that is Black America's turmoil and Barry Gorey's like, play the hits. And Marvin's like, no.

I will play a hit that will also address the moment that this country finds itself in. I want to bring that into this album, which turned out to be what's going on. Stevie's watching all this happen and being like, hmm, okay. So if you push back on Barry, he'll yield a little bit. Like Marvin, Marvin got to make what's going on for Motown. He didn't leave the company to do it. But Stevie got close to leaving. He threatened to leave.

Barry was like, yes, I have kind of not been giving you all the money I owe you. You know, just you were a kid. I didn't think you would notice. You report in the show that there is millions of dollars owed at one point to which Stevie sees basically pennies. And he figure it out. He gets a lawyer. And the lawyer's like, Barry, come on.

Give us the money. It gives him the best recording deal in history. at that point. It works out. And it's a real, I mean, if you're Barry Gordy, it's a gamble,

right? Right. Because you know the talent is there. He's not your best-selling artist. He is not your most popular artist at this point. He's not the most critically acclaimed of your artists at this point. And, you know, Barry,

for all of the shit you can give him for being the kind of manager and executive that he was, was, he wasn't out of his mind. And he knew there was something in Stevie. But he also knew that he didn't want anybody, like, I'm going to use the word defecting. He didn't want anybody leaving the company. But, you know, people got done right. People got done wrong. I mean, Gladys Knight and the Pips, he'd let them get away. Jackson Five eventually get away. I mean, yes. But by then, you know, things were slipping. And the company was beginning, the company was on its decline. And Stevie was, became the crown, in the Motown holdings, right?

Yeah, in the 70s. Yes. I want to back up for a second because you describe this time as his condensed education where he's in this pressure cooker where he really gets to observe everything that happens in music

from the music making process, hit songwriting, the business, the touring. But at this time, he's Little Stevie Wonder. And he's treated kind of like a novelty act in a certain way. That's what the albums, I mean, the jazz soul of little Stevie? Yeah, it's like, look at this

little child prodigy. He's incredibly talented. Tribute to Uncle Ray. Sorry, I mean, these are all like, let the blind kids sing blind man's music. Right. Aside from just negotiating a better contract with Barry Gordy, what does he do in his music

in this classic period that transcends what Motown is doing? The one obvious thing that makes a difference is songline, right? These are, the average Motown song, maybe three minutes. I mean, the greatest Motown songs are definitely not three minutes. They are like 230, 2.45 at the max. Yeah.

But I think that the first thing I would say immediately is that the songs were longer, right? There are six-minute songs on this record. I mean, four minutes seems like an eternity in some ways. but, you know, there's a song, I mean, Superwoman, where were you when I needed you is two songs that run for like six minutes, basically. What is he doing in this time?

Because it's not just that he's, you know, extending his musicality and sort of working more at the piano and his instruments. Like there's a shift in moving from sort of the conversation of showing his talents being this child prodigy to really moving into a place

of finding, like, great affect in his music. So what is he doing with this? I think that the thing that the time is doing, and the reason to sort of think about that before anything else, is that the songs become this, like, playground for his ideas, right? That first album, Music of My Mind, it's obviously important, but it also is just musically, it's so rich, and it's the thickest, I think, of the five albums,

because he's figuring out how to use this console, this Tonto. The giant synthesizer, yeah. It's like as big as a room. I think that what's happening here on these albums is that there is like a slabbiness to the sound, right? Like these are thick sounds. These are weird sounds. These are definitely sounds not coming from your standard

manual instruments, right? These are sounds being processed through something else. One of those processors is Tonto, but the other processor is Stevie's liberated imagination, right? Girl Blue, for instance, that is a great song on Music of My Mind. It is emotionally great, but also a lot of the songs that will recur later have the same sort of sonic palette, but it's almost like you can hear the adjustments being made in the middle of the song,

trying to find a range for the synthesizer. But you can just hear in these songs a sound being worked out. And when he comes with the second album in the streak, six months later, it's tight. Yeah, right? These are pop songs you can put on the radio. You point out in your show, it's significant his use of the synthesizer here because prior to this moment, the synthesizer was primarily used for bleeps and bloops and sound effects. Science fiction. Science fiction. Science fiction oriented sound. That's the association that we think of. There had been some classical composers, Milton Babbitt, Wendy Carlos. I understand Steve you want to try to get in touch with Wendy Carlos, so I think refused to see him. It could have been a different story if the phone had gotten picked up. You know what I mean? I don't know what the story would be, but it would be different.

Totally. Because Bob and Malcolm are their own people. But anyway, go. Well, Wendy Carlos was making classical music. And Bob and Carlos were making. Something new. Something interesting that definitely has more to do with the work we got than Wendy Carlos was doing. Yeah. Yeah. In this five-year period, he is developing the language of the synthesizer, which is today, really the predominant instrument in popular music. It's pretty wild. And he really makes the language of this thing.

Like, how is it going to fit into the mix? What instruments does it replace? Does it imitate another instrument or is it its own new timbre? And if so, how do we make it listenable in a pop song and not make it sci-fi, other worldliness, and strange? Of course, some of what's attractive about the instrument is that it is new and articulating new ideas in this time of great change and upheaval that he's articulating in his music. But he's finding a place for this thing that at the time most people didn't know how to program. CV showed us how to use this instrument and he knew how to. to get sounds out of this instrument that most people never learn to use their synthesizer properly.

Right. Until YouTube came around, you could actually learn how to use these very complex tools. You used to go get PhDs to study the synthesizer if you wanted to learn how to use these dry-in, you know, modular synths. So it's stunning that he- Think about that. I mean, just think about that, right? Yeah. This person, I mean, would it be crazy to say that he gave himself a PhD in the synthesizer?

I would say with working with Robert Margaret Marblev and Malcolm Cecil, he did. Yeah. Talent is like competency. Being competent is not enough. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. If you're able to play your instrument with great strength is not enough to make deeply, emotionally effective music. Yes.

Yes. In getting the freedom, this liberation from the Motown control, he gets full freedom to make whatever he wants in his new contracts. What does he start to grapple with? Are there core themes that you identify across these five albums that he's working out? Yeah, I mean, there's maybe four buckets of Stevie Wonder themes, right? Let's go through them.

One obvious one is love. That is a huge one, but it's not love for its own sake, right? It is his understanding that love is the most important experience that we as human being can offer each other and receive for ourselves. So it's the highest calling.

We both got to see him at Madison Square Garden recently. Yes. And the whole time is him basically acting as a preacher saying, like, we all need to love one another. Yes. Like, we need to get out of all of our conflict. Some of it sometimes is really a lot of platitudes. It sounds platitudinous, but he believes it.

He believes it. He truly, it is not a bromide when he, says it. Is there a number one love song that you feel like really captures this or a song that comes to mind? Well, okay, there are the things where like he's taking love to the doctor, right? Love needs to get a checkup, right? Love's need to love today, right? Like, that is, that is a song about love being bandaged with a thermometer in its mouth and like is waiting for the doctor to come and see how it's doing. But then there's something like, I mean, one of the, you know, a big moment on the show for me is confessing to other black people that as was not my song.

I was hearing it in a way that wasn't a received wisdom. I was hearing this person make a choice about what it means to sing about love in the first place. You have the option, I would say at this period in time in 1975, 1976, you could be Curtis Mayfield. Consistently seeing it by. all the ways in which the country is failing black people, right? To be like overtly and obviously melodically political.

But singing about love in a much different way than Stevie Wonder is. And it's, to me, it just struck me as a profoundly, deeply political act to sing as variously and as passionately and as both prescriptively and empathetically. as he has about love, right? He's always inviting a listener in to share in his love, whether it's for his child, like, isn't she lovely?

If you go back and read the reviews of songs in the key of life, so many of them are just like... Was he slam for the sentimentality of, Isn't she lovely? Wow. Yep. Wow.

And they're not hearing it swing. That song swings. I mean, I don't need to say this about Isn't she lovely, but they weren't hearing that. And Steve he was always being dinged for how, quote, bad, unquote, his lyrics were. He was naive. This guy, by the time songs in the key of life comes out, he's 26 years old.

Think about this. He's 26. Think about what a 26-year-old, what else that's a 26-year-old could have been doing in 1976. My gosh. What else he could have been singing about, right? We're all being asked by this person to go down this path. But, you know, zone number two. is the political stuff, right?

Like, all the songs that, like, aimed, many of them aimed at Nixon, all of them aimed in some way at the ways in which this country has failed a lot of its citizens. There is the real politic of something like you haven't done nothing.

What it means to, like, write a song about how Nixon is failing black people and is lying about what he is doing and can do for them. This song becomes, a single and Nixon resigns, I think, like the next week. That song and Nixon's resignation are very, very related to each other. I mean, not causally, but like cosmically.

Yes. Think about the sort of social symbolism of this then-24-year-old guy, writing this song about all the president's failings, enlisting the hot new, younger than Stevie Wonder guys at the late. the Jackson 5 to come sing the backing vocals on that song, right? All the do-do wops on that song, right? Like, each brother gets a bat, right? There's like one do-do wop for each brother, right?

One do or do or a wop for each brother. On the liner notes, they've all got exclamation points after each one. So it's like, you know, all these motherfuckers are getting a bat to beat Nixon over the head. Wow, I never had thought about the sort of like taking duwop and transitioning it into an automotopia of like actually beating Nixon. Oh my goodness. And I just feel like the way that he thinks about politics, it's almost more interesting and more powerful than the way he thinks about love except, you know, like when I'm arguing about what the love songs are doing. They are also a kind of politics. But he was really good.

You know, he's Mr. No. At all. Jesus, children of America Evil Why have you engulfed so many heart evil So do you consider Are we in another bucket then If we go to living in the city Village Ghetto Land?

No, same bucket Just different flavors of that In the same way that there's like 32 flavors Or 57 varieties of Love Songwis TV These 59 songs contain like of like the 59 songs made in this stretch. They all contain different

aspects of of social ill, right? Another bucket is the breakup song. Those are love songs but they're a particular kind of love song where like somebody's done somebody wrong.

The sort of like acceptance of blame or the laying of blame the speculation about who's to blame, right? Wait, there's one more, and I've forgotten it now. Well, I mean, I guess the religious songs are, like, not gospel as a sound, but God as a presence in these, like on a lot of these songs, right? And the ways in which faith and religion and churchiness function. When you feel your life's too much, just go have a talk with God. But then you've got a lot of overlap among these categories too, right?

They all drip into another. They all sort of bleed into each other, but they can be made discrete categories as well. One of the things you discuss towards the end of your series, and throughout, is the way in which the young version, Little Stevie, the sort of caricature of this child prodigy, that story, especially for white America, mass media,

Stevie is considered today in his legacy in some ways has almost gone back to this caricature of, oh, C.B. Wonder, he's just joyous. He makes everybody happy. Like, his music is wedding party music, and that's nice. Right, right. And your series works really effectively

at showing the depth of his musicality, of his expression, of his impact, especially going through songs that are often misunderstood. Yes, yes. And so you really use music as your evidence. maybe we could do that with superstition. What is superstition and where does it fit in the bucket?

I just think that the thing about that song that's easy to overlook is time has made it easy to overlook, right? It's the song that, like, its longevity has obscured its meaning in some ways. Like, what I think it means anyway. And people mostly associate it, unfortunately, with this time of year. It is October. Superstition. What does superstition have to do with Halloween? Like, it's been made a kid song.

I mean, a lot of Stevie Wonder and kids, that's a whole thing that we, by the end of the show, we are really embracing as a wonderful part of why Stevie Wonder is so important and why he's lasted this long in so many ways is because, like, most people discover him as children. My children listen to Stevie Wonder.

They are two and five. And they love his music. Yeah. Yeah. Like every single, every single person who is 50 and older had a story about some, all their stories of Stevie Wonder begin in childhood. That probably goes back to what you said from the very beginning is that his melody is just spectacular and it's memorable.

And so, and that is what I think young people tune into first. It's just that really catchy melody. Well, what's funny is he doesn't really write choruses to me. I mean, his choruses don't function. I mean, we get into this in the show, but, like, his choruses aren't typically, you know, A, A, A, B, A, A, B, A, A, B. Like, he's not doing that.

He's typically just, it's one line. Yeah, superstition is a great example. Then some kind of musical melody that has never sung, right? The horns on superstition are the chorus. Right. Right. Those big horns. Like, the horn.

are the thing that the song is building toward once you get to what we would identify as a chorus. But like, superstition ain't the way. I mean, that sounds complete, right? Like, it is declarative and it is prescriptive. But then, before you can get to the second verse,

you get, I don't know how many bars of horns, four bars of horns. It's very, satisfying, but not a, like, a lingual necessity to understand. Everybody can understand what a horn is doing. So many of his great songs don't need a typical chorus to feel good. It's not a Katie Perry song. The thing that's satisfying about those is only the chorus. And there's so many songs that are just like, you just want to get to the chorus. But not Stevie. Like, the satisfying part really is the verses the pre-chorus, then what? whatever the chorus turns out to be. Instrumental hooks. I mean, how many people have pop songs like Sir Duke where you're like,

yeah, people are singing these really exyncopated horn lines. And a certain way, what I'm hearing with superstition is like these horns and these melodies and the sort of deceptive non-chorus chorus have sort of lulled us into not actually paying attention to what this thing is really about. Which to me is about, you know,

you were being sort of brainwashed into, an anti-love, right? And like an understanding of people who are different from you is having inferior traits, which essentially is how, you know, white supremacy and racism work, right? But it isn't just that white people believe this superstition that black people are bad. Like, you know, we are essentially the ladder that you can't walk under. It's that black people, he wants black people to not believe that they are the latter, right? L-A-D-E-R.

And both are superstitions, and neither one held as a value or a way of being is any way to proceed. You know, if you believe in things that you don't understand, then you suffer. You've just sort of united all of his buckets in one, I'm realizing. Yeah. Because this is like needing to heal inner trauma, pain, love, politics, breaking up with your own trauma. and higher calling Almighty is sort of all within superstition. Yeah.

I mean, I also think that like because it sounds so good, I mean, funk does a lot of work in his music and it really, you know, it can kind of obscure the sort of darkness in some of the songs, but it also, I think, makes it easier to receive the message of some of them, right?

Like, Stevie wanted to be a preacher and he wound up becoming one whose pulpit essentially was his keyboard console. Essentially the way that he is thinking about how to get a message out is coming through his deployment of these funk ideas in a lot of cases.

And a song like superstition exemplifies that. It's the apotheosis of that idea. Because it sounds great. It is a song that when he played it at Madison Square Garden, you know, we were all dancing to it, right? No one was sitting down.

Everybody was dancing to superstition. I did have a moment where I was like, I turned to my friend Nikita. I was like, Nikita, I don't know if I could dance in this song anymore. But I can't help it because it just, it sounds so good. You have so many amazing interviews with the icons of music and culture and presidents and so on, etc. I love Jimmy Jam, the producer, saying, you know,

you can't have funk without fun. and some of this music is just working on us. It is so fun. But I feel like your series, which I enjoyed so much, is working to show us that there's a lot more going on here. The Wonder of Stevie,

it's everywhere you get podcasts. On Audible, you get a special bonus episode with Stevie and Barack Obama. Yes. I love the series. Everyone should listen to it. It's spectacular.

Thank you. Yeah. Thank you, Wesley. It's been a lot of fun. Thanks. Switched on Pop is produced by Rana Cruz, edited by Art Chung, engineered by Brandon McFarole.

Illustrations by our Scott Leap, and we are a member of the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture, which is part of New York Magazine. You can subscribe to New York Mag at NYMag.com slash pod. And Nate, before we go, you and I have had a major conflict

that we discussed on our last episode, yeah? It's about our series Switches Brew. Oh, yeah, yeah, of course, yeah. Our friend, Noam Hassanfeld, from the Vox.com podcast, Unexplanable, has two pitches for us as an alternative to our music recommendation series, Switches Brew, which you don't like in the way that it celebrates Miles Davis, and I'm put up with that. How about it? I'm not upset with the Miles Davis. You're misrepresenting my suris here. It's not the Miles Davis reference. It's the Switches brew of it. And the fact that

every time we illustrate it's a coffee cup, it drives me nuts. How about switch hits? I know you love baseball. I do love baseball. That's okay. I'm intrigued. So that's Noam's first idea. The second one is the Situation Room hosted by Wolfgang Amadeus Blitzer.

Come on, all good segments are puns. I mean, I love that that's been uttered into existence. I probably never want to hear it again. But switch hits or switched hits or switched on hits. I don't know. something there. I'm, I'm, uh, I'm, uh, I'm, uh, I'm liking this. But we are not putting a, a goddamn baseball bat on the, the illustration for that for, for, for if we do that, okay? It's been decided. Uh, yeah. Uh, no, I can't promise you anything. Uh, I would love to,

though, hear from our listeners. If you do have any suggestions, you can find us on all the social media sites at Switched on Pop. We'll be back next week with a spine tingling goose bump. provoking spooky episode. And until then, thanks for listening.