The Wonder of Stevie - 4 - Fulfillingness’ First Finale | 1974

Episode Date: October 3, 2024

What’s next? Wesley’s favorite album in the streak. But it’s not everyone’s favorite. Stevie Wonder’s trying to figure something out on this record. It shows a different, moodier, more reflective side. Following an unexpected and life-changing event, Stevie releases the fourth album in the streak, Fulfillingness’ First Finale.Featuring Yolanda Adams, Alex Pappademas, and more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You know what's weird? To this day, I'm trying to wrestle with how do I feel about fulfilling this first finale? I'm still trying to wrestle it. This is Amir Questlove-Thompson, host of the Questlove Supreme podcast on iHeart. He's a music encyclopedia, so I thought maybe he could help me process how I feel

about fulfilling this first finale, an album that I feel like people just don't understand the way I wish they would. Even back then, I was trying to wrestle with it because... As a kid. Yeah, as a kid. Because the thing is that when someone is just too damn perfect, you start to take them for granted.

So, you know, by the time that I'm three turning four, Stevie was just on a constant loop in my household. So I think if I were to put his genius canon in order, this album is always kind of last with me. Ooh. No, and I'm not, look. No, no. I think it's all perfection.

But, you know, if you're telling me the house is on fire and I can save all but one record. In my mind, I think I might be like, you know what? Hey, I can still get my Stevie fix on and and leave fulfilling this first finale behind. Amir. Okay, so I'm just going to tell you something. Yeah. If the house is on fire and I can only take one Stevie record. Don't say it.

Oh, it's fulfilling this. It's fulfilling this first finale. Are you serious? Oh, I'm serious. I'm Wesley Morris. This is The Wonder of Stevie. And today we're talking about a different kind of soul music. We're going to explore Stevie's most spiritual album, and that is a high bar for such a spiritual artist.

Today, episode four, Fulfillingness' first finale. Fiddliness's first finale. Before I go any further in this little dispute with Questlove, which, again, I know where he's coming from, I think it's important to step back and talk a little bit about where this album came from. It's the fourth in Stevie's streak, and it comes right between the two albums that people think are the greatest albums Stevie ever made, Inner Visions and Songs in the Key of Life. Those are facts, but the important context for this album are the life-altering events that led to its creation.

It's August 1973. This is just three days after the release of Inner Visions. Stevie's headed to a benefit performance for WAFR, a black-owned radio station in Durham, North Carolina. His cousin John Harris is behind the wheel, and Stevie's asleep in the passenger seat of this Mercury Cruiser they rented. They're on I-85 just outside Winston-Salem when they get into a wreck with a logging truck driving down the highway in front of them. You could do a lot of digging around and would probably find just this one photograph. It's from the Salisbury Post, the local paper in Salisbury, North Carolina. The headline above the photo reads,

Blind singer Stevie Wonder is badly hurt in wreck here. Beneath it is a picture of the car on the side of the highway, and the passenger side is just a mangle of crushed steel. The windshield on Stevie's side of the car is completely smashed in. The logging truck driver said he'd already delivered the logs, but if you look at a picture of the crash, something huge came off the back of that truck and went through the windshield on Stevie's side and straight into Stevie's head. deliver the logs, but if you look at a picture of the crash, something huge came off the back of that truck and went through the windshield on Stevie's side and straight into Stevie's head. Stevie's unconscious and bleeding profusely from his head wounds. When I heard about it,

I just could not believe it. This is Denise Williams, longtime singer in Wonderlove, in an interview shortly after the accident. I called around. I tried to find out about it. To forget it, I'm going to call right to the source. It was very frightening because of the fact that not only because of Stevie Wonder, but because he was a close friend. And I tell you, for a moment, there are a lot of people held their hearts. And for the next four days, he'd land a in the hospital in Winston-Salem, suspended between life and death. Until... There's a part of the story that Ira Tucker Jr., Stevie's tour director at the time, likes to tell. He's sitting at Stevie's bedside singing, of all things, Higher Ground to him.

And Stevie, carrying his own lyrics to the fog of this coma, starts to move his fingers in rhythm to the song. That's Ira's version of Stevie coming back to consciousness. Ira singing, Stevie moving his fingers on some kind of imaginary piano. I don't know whether any of this last part is true. So much about this crash and Stevie's recovery from it are cloaked in myth, and my retelling it is just adding to the mythology. I couldn't find a single local TV news report, and you can find one for all kinds of stuff from back then. What I can say is that the person who came back was no longer the same person in the passenger seat before the accident.

No longer even the same person who'd put out inner visions just three days before this crash. Two weeks after the accident, the Charlotte News ran an interview with Stevie in which he said he couldn't recall much about what happened. The only thing I remember, he said, is that I was unconscious and that I was definitely for a few days in a much better spiritual place about it that made me aware of a lot of things that concern my life and my future and what I have to do to reach another higher ground. Here's Denise Williams again.

I believe a lot of things came to him on that bed. I mean, that God really spoke to him and probably laid out to him what it was that he had to do, what it was that God wanted him to do. Meanwhile, there were some real practical worries about whether Stevie could really come back at all after those injuries. Did that crash in any way affect his ability to make music? His interest in making music? We were always sort of being prodded at that time by the record company. You know, not directly, but watch Stevie, see if he can still, is he still the same Stevie Wonder? This is Bob Marguliffe, Stevie's close creative partner from a BBC documentary that aired a year or so after the crash.

the same focused energy, but I think he was very much more thankful to be alive. And I think it showed in his music, too. I spoke to Bob, and he told me that the car crash changed Stevie. Physically, of course, but also emotionally, spiritually. That accident really changed his thinking a lot. He was not the same just sort of lucky guy anymore. I think he really confronted his existence.

And I think it changed him philosophically a good deal. He grew up a lot around that. I think that moved him a little closer to God. I think he realized his own mortality at that point. Fulfillingness' first finale came out in July 1974, not quite a year after the accident. It's not like Stevie's other albums. It's darker, moodier, more righteous, less happy, and it's much more overtly religious

than anything he'd done before. Side one feels like you're trapped in a dream, and side two is like you've exploded out of that dream into the harsh realities of recovery, of being human, mortal. I don't want anything burning up in a fire, but if something had to go, it could not be this one. Because Fulfillingness' first finale isn't simply a great album. It's the strongest album of the five in Stevie's streak, at least according to me. Which is to say then that it's one of the greatest albums in recorded music. It won three Grammys in 1975, including Album of the Year.

So it's not like nobody appreciated it at the time. But there's something about the way that memory works and how we speak in the present about things in the past. And memory tends to play tricks on how we feel now about this album. So today, here I am with a simple plea. Let's please reconsider its place in Stevie's classic period. That is all I'm asking. I also know I'm not alone.

Fulfillingness is people. We exist. One of those people is one of my closest friends. Alex Papademos is the author of one really good book about Keanu Reeves and another about Steely Dan. He's the host of the podcast, The Big Hit Show. And I wanted to talk to Alex about some of our favorite moments on this album and why, for us, this is the one you reach for in a house fire.

I already have one congregant in the pews of the Stevie Wonder AME Church of Fulfillingness's first reconsideration, and he's not just a congregant. All right, so Alex, I'm not trying to throw Questlove under a bus. I mean, he just ranked them, and that's number five of the five albums in the streak, right? And I see why this is the one that's maybe easiest to drop, because it's transitional. It's in between two masterpieces. It falls in the shadow in both directions. Wherever the sun is, it's not hitting Fulfillingness' first finale because there's- It gets no direct sunlight.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. I get it. I love the transitional album. I love anybody's transitional album. I love the ones where you are seeing somebody in the process of working something out. Yes. Let me ask you, what is it that you think Stevie's trying to figure out here?

I think that he has been through an experience and he's trying to square what he knows about the afterlife and eternity, what he really fully knows and believes. I know that there is a God. I know that there's a believes. I know that there is a God. I know that there's a heaven. I know that there's a hell. I'm going to proceed in that knowledge. Now, I don't think there's a lot of doubt in what Stevie's doing here. I don't think he's wandering. I don't think he's lost in any way, but I think that he's trying to figure out what's actually next. And I like the figuring out better than

the having it figured out. And maybe it's just that I think you can hear more of somebody's humanity in their struggle, in their trying to solve the puzzle, in their trying to sort of figure out their direction. Maybe that's what it is. That gets to the heart of my feelings about this album, the sound of figuring something out. And the thing that Stevie's figuring out is the thing, the biggest thing, which is our relationship to mortality, to God, if that's your thing, or at least to the meaning of being alive. And therefore to what we are here on this earth to do, how to live passionately and truthfully. Those are the things getting worked out

on Fulfilling This Is First finale. The concerns that he's addressing are so thematically unified to me, even if it's musically kind of all over the place, from Boogie on Reggae Woman to Bird of Beauty and all of those things. Yes. It's almost like I go to individual moments,

individual beats within songs, like things that I just want to go back and hear again and again. One achievement of this album is that it's no one thing or one sound. It's fast, it's slow, it's hard, it's soft. It's got a lot of different temperatures and moods and styles. Take Boogie On Reggae Woman. It's a fun dance song, one of the funnest. But the more you listen, the more you realize

Stevie is working out some deep shit in it. It's a boogie on, reggae woman. I mean, the thing that's great about it, too, is that it's not a reggae song. Also not a reggae song. Not a reggae song. It is a perfect disco song is that it's not a reggae song. Also not a reggae song. Not a reggae song. It is a perfect disco song that happens to be about a reggae woman and his experience of meeting a reggae woman, I guess. There is so much kind of play and joy.

There's even him sort of calling out to himself. Can I play? Can I play? Yes. Can I play? Can I play? Can I play? This, to me, is what this song is actually about. Stevie using this song, this imagined encounter,

to question whether he can still play in every sense of the word. Can he still play his music? Is he still sexy? Can he be his full self back in the world when he's out of his hospital bed? It's still all of the Stevie Wonder stuff is happening. All of the stuff that we associate with him, all of those grooves where you can hear him moving to it as you're listening to it, all of that. But it's in service of something bigger and darker and more ambiguous and hard to fully

get into. That being said, it is also Stevie Wonder at the peak of his powers doing Stevie Wonder things all over the place. And it's wildly up and down in terms of emotional valence. And I think that's what's really fun about it is that the transitions are sharp and defined. Basically like from boogie on reggae woman into creeping you're dropped into, it's like the warp zone. You've been in the sky and now you are underwater. The vibe shifts abruptly and I kind of love that. Yeah. Yeah.

It doesn't ease you along. You know, it doesn't feel random. It doesn't feel chaotic. Yeah, yeah. It doesn't ease you along. You know, it doesn't feel random. It doesn't feel chaotic. It feels deliberate. And so it's this very compact and concise illustration, I think, of everything that he was great at. that he was great at. Creepin'? That's the opposite of a jam. Into my brain Creepin'?

That's the opposite of a jam. I mean, Boogie On Reggae Woman is a jam that DJs still throw on the turntable to get the party turned. But Creepin'? It feels like its name. It's a song about an actual love dream. Stevie thinks he's found stability, but it's a figment of his imagination.

Why must it be that you always creep not into my bed, not on the couch when I'm sleeping, but into my dreams? I've always imagined that side one of this record was the dream. He's out of his body and he's struggling to get back in it the way he was before the crash. There are strange voices that interrupt at strange times, and he's lost his self-confidence in part because he doesn't feel like himself. He's frustrated, spiritually, emotionally, physically. This side of the album ends with Creepin'. Then, you had to flip the album over.

And if you did, you would have heard this. You Haven't Done Nothing, the album's biggest hit at the time. That is the sound of somebody coming out of a dream. But what's remarkable about it is that all that tortured dreaminess on side one has given away to the harsh realities of side two. Of reentering your body, yes, but also your life and the world, this country, that Richard Nixon still runs. So the first thing Stevie does upon re-entry back into his body is not sing, I'm here, y'all, I'm back. Instead, he's singing, wait, wait, Nixon still here?

Nothing's changed. And to reflect the status quo, Stevie does something I've never recognized in any of his songs. He programs a drum machine that just chugs away like some piece of his songs. He programs a drum machine that just chugs away like some piece of factory equipment. The terrible dreams may be over,

but here Stevie is, newly awake in a broken country with a broken heart and a broken faith in humanity. The uncertainty and the anger and the disappointment are new states for him, but the hope of the final two songs, they're not. This album feels intensely, deeply, uniquely personal. We are able to eavesdrop on a conversation that's very much an internal conversation, I think.

This is not about the audience. And I think that's maybe what makes it great is the intimacy of that conversation. And that you think, you know, Stevie, and yet you don't know what Stevie looks like on a bad night, you know, on a sort of like when he's alone in a room with God, like, what is that conversation? Like, Hey everybody, Smokey Robinson here. And we're talking about Stevie Wonder. I hope you're enjoying this. I am. That run of albums that Stevie had, you know, he'd go to the Grammys and he'd get seven or eight Grammys in the same night. As far as I'm concerned, you know, Stevie is the musical man.

And his music has proved that. Stevie Wonder's music covers everything from gospel to blues to jazz, classical, whatever you can think of, you can find some of that element in Stevie Wonder's music. I don't know how music, period, would feel if there was no Stevie Wonder. Stevie Wonder has made a tremendous contribution to music around the world, not just here in the United States.

His music is internationally profound. This is another thing that I love about Motown, man. We go to places in Europe and all over the world, and we're singing these songs, and probably 60 to 70% of the people in our audience don't even speak English, but they sing those songs. And they know them verbatim. Now, Steve and I have been traveling on the road all over the place,

and you might be a person who does that too. And your home may be just sitting empty. Why let it be empty when it could be full? Turn it to an Airbnb and earn some money while you're traveling. So if you're curious about this, just go to airbnb.com slash host and find out more about it. What Alex and I were saying to state the obvious is something I felt for a very long time.

It's that ultimately, and more explicitly than any other Stevie Wonder album, Fulfilling This Is First finale is a gospel album. There's a quote from Hebrews chapter 11, verse 1. It goes, Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. This is a work of art about faith. It's about salvation and redemption. What can be saved?

What can be redeemed? These don't tend to be rock music concerns. These are church matters. So it makes sense to talk to somebody versed in these ideas, somebody who practices what she preaches. I reached out to Yolanda Adams, the songwriter, arranger, and singer of gospel music, a major popular architect of the modern gospel sound, to help me through how gospel music works on this album. Yolanda, she's more than an esteemed gospel scholar. She loves Stevie Wonder passionately. Growing up listening to him and running to the store when you could run to the store and buy albums,

you know, that was fantastic to me, man. When we talked about Motown Records in the first episode, I mentioned how the company's innovation, one of many, was this skill at merging the sacred and the allegedly profane. To combine what you heard in church with music you were just drinking and dancing and romancing to the night before. Worship plus courtship.

So what I wanted to get into with Yolanda is this. If Stevie started his sound at Motown, isn't all of Stevie's music gospel music? How long has this bush been burning? Well, first of all, Stevie has influenced everybody, especially those of us who grew up in the church. There are only a handful of artists who are able to move back and forth between the church and, you know, global impact and influence. He's one, of course, we always talk about how Aretha was able to go back and forth and back and forth. I think because that was his call and that was her call, they didn't see a difference. You know, doing what they did out on stages where 20,000 to 100,000 people were watching or in a service where the music was appropriate for that service.

And there were only like 200 people there. The thing that I kind of wanted you to help me with is that this album strikes me as being a conversation between Stevie and his God. Yes. I'm wondering how this album has struck you when you've gone back to it. Oh my gosh. I go back to it every now and then because he has no idea how many people from all walks of life, especially from the church and from gospel music. Yes. From all walks of life, especially from the church and from gospel music. Yes.

We knew this guy was not just a guy trying to just make money from his art and his talent. He really was speaking from his heart and his soul to give messages of love to people who may not ever step foot in a church, but would be able to receive it from him. a step foot in a church, but would be able to receive it from him. You know, of course, I know the whole album, but when I heard as a kid, heaven is a 10 zillion light years away, I was like, whoa, this is the way that we should give the love of God to everybody. Stevie was one of those ingrained people in our household that you knew cleaning up on Saturday, you were going to hear Aretha, you were going to hear Stevie. And, you know, if mama got caught up enough, you were going to hear all of the Stevie albums. But I loved it because what it did is it gave me a foundation of it's okay to have a spiritual relationship with God, love him with all your heart, and then make cool music so that people can understand that he accepts you as you are. And he accepts everybody. Now, I want to go back to Heaven is a Zillion Light Years Away.

Yes. The song is great in and of itself, but there are all these wonderful moments in it that are just sonically fascinating because he is incorporating the church experience into this message of love and accepting God. And I just want to play this one part for you right here. So it's these other voices right here that I'm interested in. Yes. My God tells me. And I say it's taken him so long. Because we've got so far to come.

Yeah. Yes, yes. Now, he is showing the importance of the call and response. Yes. So that whole exchange there is so brilliant because it's not just about feeling the spirit of God. It's also about feeling the spirit of man and why, as a black man, do I have to be inferior when all of us, and like he said, I thought this world was made for every man, when all of us come from the same source, we come from the same spirit. So why is it still a problem that this whole way of looking at different religions,

different races, different ethnicities, why are we still doing that? Thank you for putting it that way. I feel that's the experience I had. I'm taken out of the song, or I'm taken deeper into the song is maybe the way to think about it, and put in a location that is very familiar to me. I've seen that person in the pews just be like,

and simultaneously it's the preacher and it's us in the congregation. Yes. This album came out after, you know, Stevie had that car crash in 1973. Almost died. Mm-hmm. And this album is the first after the car crash. And I think there's a version of this story where either he dies in that car crash or he makes a different album that doesn't even emotionally correspond to that experience.

But Fulfillingness' first finale to me is almost entirely about recovering from that incident. almost entirely about recovering from that incident. I'm wondering, what's the difference between, you know, some of the spiritual themes here on Fulfilling This Is First Finale and some of the other albums? Do you hear one or sense one? I think after you have experienced something in life that most people will not, it changes the way you feel, first of all, about yourself. Then it also changes the way you feel about humanity.

You become more aware of the fact that we're all more alike than we are different. And that life is so precious that at any moment, your life could change. I believe that there's always a spiritual theme to Stevie's music. Always. Because he's a spiritual being. You know, whether it's the song, They Won't Go When I Go. I was about to bring it up. That song, although it seemed dark when I first heard it as a kid, I realized the when I long to go.

So long away from here. That whole run right there. They Won't Go When I Go. That title. We're talking about Stevie's righteous ascent to heaven. And other folks may be going somewhere else. Salvation in the face of damnation. What is this song as music?

Because it's simultaneously, correct me if I'm wrong, or I'm thinking about this in a not particularly productive way, but it sounds to me like several different Black church ideas happening simultaneously. I think it's not just Black church ideas. I think it's not just black church ideas. I think it's black culture ideas because we all have it's almost like, you know, if you have family members who are from Louisiana, you know what that funeral procession music sounds like. The second lines, the second lines. Yeah, the second line. Yeah.

And it's not the rejoicing part of the second line. It's that somber part of the second line that you hear almost moaning, you know, and culturally that used to be the only time that we could show emotion was during death. So that whole, like the moaners bench, as the old folks used to say in the church, you know, you had folks who would do that to evoke that emotion from folks who were trying to keep it in and were not trying to deal with their pain. They would hold their bodies and rock. They would sit like that. Yep, yep. And just rock.

Oh, but remember after a certain moan from deacon whomever, mother would unfold those hands. Yes, sir. They fly up. And fly up, right. That's what I see. And they won't go when I go. Well, can we go back to the bridge for one second?

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Because that's beautiful. We go down the moaning, the moaning, the bridge for one second? Yes, yes, yes. Yes, because that's beautiful. We go down the moaning, the moaning, the moaning, the moaning, the moaning. Mm-hmm. And then this. People sinning just for fun

They will never see the sun But they can never show their faces There ain't no room for the hopeless sinner who will take more than. Yes, sir. What is that for you? What was that last little line for you? Oh, my gosh. You know, the part where it says people sinning just for fun.

They will never see the sun. Yes. You know, when I was a kid, I thought it was the S-U-N, you know, and then when I started listening and my own relationship with God grew, I realized, oh, that's the S-O-N. The thing for me is when you make the distinction between S-U-N and S-O-N, my mind is blown. Because, I mean, I'm literal-minded. It takes me a second to even think about what the alternative meanings of something could be.

And I was sort of stuck on what it would mean for Stevie Wonder, a person who is almost a plant himself, right? Like, the sun is so important to his music. To tell somebody, to damn them by saying, y'all over here, you're never going to experience this thing to his music. Mm-hmm. To tell somebody, to damn them by saying, y'all over here, you're never going to experience this thing

that is so essential to my outlook on life. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. This thing that warms and lights and shows the way. It just,

this song is devastating for how angry it is. Angry and compassionate at the same time. You know, that preacher, preacher, preacher thing. But then he softens, there ain't no room for the hopeless sinner who would take more than he could give.

It's like, okay, let me calm down. Let me state fact. Yes. And let me get back to, if he'll back to if he'll forgive me he'll forgive you too if he'll love me he'll love you too it's like whoa that's where the compassion comes in I believe well what do you make of the fact that, he could have brought in singers to do a lot of the work that is happening on this song, but in addition to playing most of the instruments himself,

he's also responding to his own call. Yeah. You know what I think, Wes? Yeah, what? I think it's just a total offering. I think it's just a total offering. The first sign that he is climbing out of this valley is Bird of Beauty. And then the last song, Please Don't Go, is an even higher trek up this mountain back to his full self.

And closer to God, right? The higher up you go, the closer to him you get. But let's just take a look at it. The lower you are, the more you can actually reach out and feel it. I mean, Yolanda, I just got to chill, first of all. Okay, sorry. Second, I think he had to go down there. To get back up. Yes.

Isn't that how life does us? Yes. Life does us like that. You know, sometimes the things that we think are the worst things that could ever happen in our lives are the turning points. They are the things that eclipse us and then catapult us to the next level of whatever. So I think that's what They Won't Go does for this project. It's like, whoa, wait a minute. Let me flip this over and really find out what's going on next, you know?

Yes, yes. Well, I mean, the dismount on this album, let's just play it. Let's just play it. Let's play Please Don't Go. Yay! If that ain't church, I don't know what church is. That is stomp down church. I mean, I've caught the spirit, landed on the spirit, fallen in the spirit, got spirit all over my arms, got to wipe it off, then put it back on.

I mean, the thing that's so extraordinary about this album to me, and honestly, I swear, like the reason I wanted to talk to you about it was because that spirit is everywhere. I mean, he's literally mentioning it. Yes. Here on Please Don't Go, that moan is like, ah, you know, it's like a breath of fresh air. It's like getting something out that is undescribable. You know, you just can't describe it, but, you know, that's our way of talking. You know, we've heard all of our lives in church, you know, when you moan, the devil don't know what you're talking about. Yes. Jeez Louise. All right. Yolanda Adams, I think we're done here. Just burnt the house, burnt the neighborhood. We don't even have

a city anymore. Thank you. This was amazing. I've been thinking a lot about Yolanda's understanding of what moaning is doing in black music and how it's working on this album. It's everywhere. There are moans of joy and grief and relief and frustration. Guttural moans! But also, this is an album by someone who spent the better part of a week in the hospital because of a serious head injury, which would cause anybody to be out of it. So let's assume there were some trippy things going on in Stevie's mind. And for that person,

he'd be doing the moaning of somebody having a particularly bad sleep. That kind of moaning, I know. You're listening to the wonder of Stevie from Pineapple Street Studios, Higher Ground Audio, and Audible. And do you want to hear more? There's a very special bonus episode only on Audible featuring me, Wesley Morris, and former President Barack Obama in an enlightening conversation with Stevie Wonder himself. Visit audible.ca slash wonder to listen now. Getting bogged down by how much new music there is out there? There's a lot. Consider a daily dose of the All Songs Considered podcast.

It's the easiest way to get tuned into the music world. We spend hours combing through the new music universe, from emerging bands to time-tested icons, to bring you your next favorite artist. To get up on your music know-how, listen to All Songs Considered from NPR. Listen to all songs considered from NPR. I'm going to bring in a gospel choir for two reasons. One, I don't want to be alone. And two, if you grew up in the church the way Yolanda and Stevie did, you might know that there's a perfect song for thinking about where Stevie's mind, heart, and soul might have been. It's called No Ways Tired. I want to talk to y'all about moaning.

I want to give you a little testimony from me to you. Are you with me? When I was eight years old, I had a really bad case of eczema. Like, so bad, I had to be hospitalized for it. For about a week, although I'm almost certain it was twice that long, I lie in the school infirmary with nothing more to do but wonder when I was gonna leave, if I was ever gonna leave. And while I was lying there, my mind went all over the place, to dark places,

to funny places, and right outside the room, there was a red exit sign. I mean, just your plain old generic red exit sign. And it just made everything I saw turn red. That was decades ago. And I remember all of it like it just happened. Fever dreams. That's what they're called. Fulfillingness's first finale, to me, is a fever dream. Obviously Stevie didn't make it while he was still having one, and as these things go, it's lustrous, not nightmarish. But a fever dream hallmark is basically dreaming while you're fully awake and having no idea what's real and what's something else. Even the title of the album, it feels like a phrase that comes from somewhere else. Not quite everyday consciousness, if you know what I mean.

Like something his mind needed to invent to get at this experience that's beyond regular language. Fulfillingness is not normally how you make a noun out of fulfill. That's fulfillment. Stevie's word, fulfilling this, sounds like an ongoing state of fulfillment, like the steady replenishment a water source has to offer. Fulfillment is always possible. It's also possible that it won't last, that it works in phases, chapters that end or evolve.

Fulfillingness is as personal in the way that something like Inner Visions is of the people. It's private in a way that Songs in the Key of Life is for the people. This one is for him. It's about him. for him. It's about him. I always think of Music of My Mind and Talking Book and Inner Visions as being extroverted, exuberant, showy, playful. That's the Motown Stevie too. Earlier, Bob Margoleth mentioned that Stevie was different after the accident. How could he not be? This is my favorite of the great Stevie albums because it's the one where this deeply spiritual person feels ready, free enough to bare his soul. Something like that is happening on the album cover too.

The introspective merges with the retrospective. This is a collage of Stevie's life and snapshots of American life. One image has little Stevie holding his harmonica. Another is him in a bow tie that's bigger than his sunglasses. You can make out an egg yolk sun and animals you might see on the savannas of Africa. Right next to the animals, but headed in a different direction, is a car. The car tires are melting into squiggles, and you can just make out a tree lodged in the passenger side window, which is shattered. Which, in a sense, is what Stevie was after that accident. What a collage is, too.

Broken up. It's not hard to imagine an alternative universe in which Stevie puts out inner visions and maybe does die. If not literally, then certainly professionally. How do you top that? What more need be said? That's how good inner visions is. But then Stevie gets to death's door, yet doesn't pass through

and realizes that there was more to say. Fulfillingness' first finale is the statement of an artist who's faced the deepest, scariest, most unknowable questions and somehow answers them for himself. I don't feel no wayside No waste time Come too far from where I started from Nobody told me the road would be easy And I don't believe he brought me this far And I don't believe he brought me this far

And I don't believe he brought me this far To leave me So, now what? Well, at the time for Stevie, the answer to now what was, this time, I think I really am done. I'm not going to make music anymore. At least not right now. I'm going to devote myself to something else.

Because there really is nothing left for me to say. Until something called him back. Something great, divine, and powerful enough to inspire the album that everybody else believes is simultaneously the greatest Stevie Wonder album, the last in this magical streak, and some of the greatest songs ever recorded.

And okay, yeah, there are days when maybe I think that too. That's just Stevie, because he so believes in the power of everyone seeing everyone, everyone's voice, everyone's music. It's like we are all a part of the struggle and our voices uniting and ringing together layer upon layer. That's the vision of the world he's trying to communicate to all of us. That's next time on The Wonder of Stevie. This has been a Higher Ground and Audible original. The Wonder of Stevie is produced by Pineapple Street Studios. Higher Ground Audio and Audible.

Our senior producer is Josh Gwynn. Producer is Janelle Anderson. Associate producer is Mary Alexa Cavanaugh. Senior managing producer is Asha Saluja. Executive editor is Joel Lovell. Archival producer is Justine Daum. Fact checker is Jane Drinkard. Head of sound and engineering is Raj Makija. Senior audio engineers are Davy Thank you. and Lian Doe. Score and sound design by Josh Gwynn and Raj Makija. Original score performed by Carles Music and Raj Makija. Additional music

provided by Epidemic Sound. Our choir was voiced by Keisha Chantrell, Christine Noel, Carles Abraham, and Jamal Moore,

directed and arranged by Jared Jenkins. Produced by Raj Makija and Josh Gwynn. Special thanks to Ronnie O'Hannon and Javon Haskin at Greylock Agency and Silla Gospel Choir. Hosted and executive produced by Wesley Morris.

Higher Ground executive producers are Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Corinne Gilliard-Fisher, Dan Fehrman, and Mukta Mohan. Creative executive for Higher Ground is Janae Marable. Executive producers for Pineapple Street Studios are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Max Linsky. Audible executive producers are Kate Navin and Nick D'Angelo. The Wonder of Stevie is also executive produced

by Amir Questlove Thompson, Anna Holmes, and Stevie Wonder. Questlove is the producer of this show courtesy of iHeart and can also be heard on Questlove Supreme from iHeart Podcasts. Recorded at Different Fur, Patches, The Hobby Shop, and Pineapple Street Studios. Head of Creative Development at Audible is Kate Navin. Chief Content Officer is Rachel Giazza.

Copyright 2024 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC. Sound recording, copyright 2024 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC.