The Wonder of Stevie - Talk Easy featuring Wesley Morris

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

Today we're sharing one of our favorite podcasts, Talk Easy. This episode features Wesley Morris talking about The Wonder of Stevie. Wesley unpacks Stevie Wonder’s legendary five-album run from 1972-1976, his recent “battleground states” tour in the run up to the election, and how his relationship to Stevie’s music has evolved in the process of making this limited series.Explore more episodes of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso at talkeasypod.com. New talks air every Sunday. Available wherever you get your podcasts.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey y'all, it's Josh Gwynn, lead producer of The Wonder of Stevie, and I got a treat for you. It's an episode of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso. It happens to feature a super special guest that you probably know and love who happens to be named Wesley Morris. I have a feeling you'll really like this episode because Wes and Sam sit down and really unpack Stevie's classic period and how Wes's relationship to Stevie Wonder's music shifted and evolved during the making of the show.

You can keep listening in order to enjoy the episode, but you can also head over to their feed to enjoy other conversations like the one that Sam had with Questlove or with David Byrne or Blood, or Lorde. You can subscribe to Talk Easy with Sam Pergoza wherever you get your podcasts. Enjoy! Wesley Morris, hi. Hi Sam, how are you? I'm good, how are you doing?

I'm okay! You're doing great. I'm glad you're doing great. I'm glad you're doing great. I'm glad you're doing great. I'm glad you're doing great. I'm glad you're doing great. I'm glad you're doing great.

I'm glad you're doing great. I'm glad you're doing great. I'm glad you're doing great. I'm glad you're doing great. I'm glad you're doing great. I'm glad you're doing great. I'm glad you're doing great. I'm glad you You're talking to a person who is just, I've been, I'm at work. I've been working, you know. Is this peak Wesley? No, no, no. Falling off a cliff. It's like a little cliffy. But I mean, I'm all right.

I'm all right. If I were to screening right now, I definitely would be at that moment in the movie where I'm like, I hope this movie is interesting enough to get people to watch it. I'm like, I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure.

I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not right. I'm all right. If I were to screening right now, I definitely would be at that moment in the movie

where I'm like, I hope this movie is interesting enough to keep me going and not having me fight to keep going. You hope you're watching Megalopolis. HAH! I mean, there are parts of that movie where I think it's fine if you fall asleep. Sir, this episode is following Francis Ford Coppola. Um, we, we, we, we cannot accept this.

Listen, here's what I'll say about that movie. I think, you know, I mean, it does operate by its own rhythms, right? Mm-hmm. And... Sort of like you. Well, I mean, but I also think that it's fun watching people lose their minds over all kinds of aspects of this movie.

Like, are the people freaking out about how little money it made? Like, did you just meet this man? I don't really... I mean, I know he wants people to see it, but... I also think he didn't make a movie to be number one at the box office. I just... I don't know. I love the spirit of this thing. It is an unholy mess, but there are so many wonderful copula-isms in it. And it sort of meets up with reality in these interesting ways.

And some of the performances, people are going for it. And I like that. I also love the spirit of the movie. And usually when we have you on the show, we're talking about movies. But today, we're talking about this new podcast of yours. It's about Stevie Wonder. It's called The Wonder of Stevie. The show is produced by Higher Ground, which is the Obama's company. And on the show, actually quite often on the show, you interview President Obama about his love of Stevie Wonder. And the first question you ask him is,

why does Stevie Wonder matter so much to you? And I feel like that's a good place for us to start. Why does he matter so much to Wesley Morris? Ah, I think, you know, the critic part of me just feels like Stevie Wonder is somehow, despite everything, underappreciated. You know, I mean, he's got more awards than he can probably count. His album sales are very, very, very good.

His career has been long. He's on tour as you and I are speaking. He's on a 10-day tour where he will be performing in battleground states for the upcoming election on behalf of the Harris Walls ticket. I just sort of feel like there is more to say about some of his achievements. I also think that like one set of his achievements happened 50 years ago. You know, that's an eternity. So like, why not go back half a century and sort of think through something that's happened,

something someone did, a triumphant artistic achievement that really very few people in the history of recorded music has ever done. to have made five masterpiece albums in a row, in a tiny window of time. Like five albums in basically, officially it's five years. We had a real fact checker research debate about whether we could get away with four years. But we're saying five albums in five years because 1972 to 1976 is actually five years. So this is referred to in the show as Stevie's classic period. Yes. Yes. For people that maybe haven't put on intervisions recently, explain why you wanted to focus

on this period. Because there's no precedent for what he achieved basically. So Stevie Wonder when he's 21 decides that he wants to make music for himself essentially. He's assigned to Motown Records. Motown Records of course is famous for its factory approach to hit making and some of the greatest songs ever written and recorded have come off that assembly line and Stevie didn't want to make assembly line songs anymore. And he was on the assembly line since the age of like 11 or 12 right? Yes since he was a very small child in Detroit Michigan performing live as part

of the Motown Revue his first big hit is Fingertips Part II, which is a lot like one of the strangest smash hits you're ever going to hear because it's the second half of a live performance where all the juicy stuff is. And for anybody who's never heard Fingertips Part II, but you have heard Chaka Khan's I Feel For You, it's that little interlude in the middle where somebody who in this case is Stevie Wonder says, say yeah! That's little Stevie Wonder. Not a bad impression. It's terrible.

Thank you, I appreciate that. So he gets to 21, the age where the average person who goes to college finishes. And he's like, I'm ready to become an adult. Berry Gordy, what are you gonna do about that? Should I leave the label? Also, where's all the money that you were holding as part of my kid savings account, basically?

And he negotiates this deal that gets him paid very well. But more important is that it gives him the freedom to express all of these ideas that he's been storing in his brain for all this time. And he meets these two engineers who are also musicians named Robert Margaleff and Malcolm Cecil. And they have this amazing synthesizer that, Sam, are you a Doctor Who person?

I'm not. You don't have to be. But basically, he's Doctor Who gets around the universe traveling in something called the TARDIS. This thing is officially nothing like the TARDIS, but if the TARDIS had a funky cousin, it would be this synthesizer called Tonto, which is just a room-sized synthesizer

that's got all these knobs and plugs and sockets, and you stick chords here and pull them out of there. And the three of them managed to pull off four of the five greatest albums anybody's ever made. They did Music of My Mind, which comes out in 72, Talking Book, which comes out at the end of 72. Can you imagine you just go like, I'm putting out music of my mind.

Anyone who would put that out now, we would go, like D'Angelo, take a decade, take two. We'll be ready for you when you come back. I mean, I think it's like if Frank Ocean, I mean, I have very mixed feelings about blonde. If Frank Ocean did what Frank Ocean seemed like he could have done in 2012 when Channel Orange came out, and you got, you know, a second album six to seven months later,

then a year after that, you got an even better album. Nobody's... I mean, Kanye West might be as prolific and as great an artist. And he definitely peaked, right? West might be as prolific and as great an artist. And he definitely peaked, right? What do you mean? I mean- I'm joking. Okay. I'm sorry.

I was actually gonna answer that question. The thing that's impressive about this streak is it actually happened. You don't have to qualify it at all. There's no, like if you did Elton John, for instance, you'd have to account for the fact that there are some albums in there that aren't as great as Madman Across the Water or Honky Tonk Chateau or Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, right? But he was, he was feeling it for a good five, six years. But Stevie Wonder's situation is much more straightforward.

Like he made five albums in five years in the raw masterpieces and nobody disagrees. Some people might like some of them more than others, but that is basically the streak or the achievement here. Matthew 10 One of the reasons you've made this show is because, quote, Stevie Wonder's music is our history, but it's also important because it's our present too. Where do you see him in our present moment? Why him? Why now? Part of this tour where he's touring,

this current tour where he's touring these battleground states is about how disappointed the person he was in 1972 and 73, 74, 75, 76 is in our present moment. The guy who fought to make Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. I should note for the listener, the tour is called, Sing Your Song As We Fix Our Nation's Broken Heart.

And it was about calling for joy over anger, which could have been said in 1972, just the same. But the music was the joy, right? The music was supplying that energy. It was also doing the work of helping to try to heal all this fractiousness and disappointment and anger among black people, but between black people and white people. The music was a tonic

for war. It was a tonic for, you know, Richard Nixon's corruption and racism and, you know, just utter bizarreness. It was a tonic for where the economy wound up by the time Ford and Carter were in the White House. It's preparing us for the possibility that Ronald Reagan could be president. The person who made this music, I think he understood the power of it. I think he understood musicologically what music can do for people. But it also was coming from a place that was never audibly anyway, his brain. There's a guy in the first episode, a professor at the Berklee College of Music, Rick McLaughlin.

I could have done the whole show with him. There's something about the way he made me understand and the way he makes a listener understand just what something like, you are the sunshine of my life is doing is music to your mood is very powerful. Stevie's aware of the difference he can make and I think his disappointment right now is that we have forgotten about who we can be and what else is inside us

and he's trying to access that again. And do you think people are capable of hearing it? Great question. I have not been to all the shows. I don't know how many people who need to hear this message are out there. But, you know, I think more centrally, the thing that Stevie Wonder understood was that, you know, if you listen to Sir Duke, I mean... music isn't everybody. You know, you can feel it all over.

It's there. It's the language we all understand. I want to talk about how you made this show because any time I'm asked about Talk Easy and the dream guest that I'd like to have on, my answer since the beginning, since 2016 when you first came on, on like episode three or four, my answer was and still is Stevie Wonder. And as I think you know painfully well, Stevie doesn't really do interviews. I mean, outside of talking to Oprah, he doesn't talk to the press. There's no Stevie Wonder documentary. There's no Stevie Wonder biopic.

I mean, at least not yet. There's no memoir. There's no Stevie Wonder biopic, I mean, at least not yet. There's no memoir. There's no memoir. Tell me, why was the limited series podcast the medium that he wanted to partake in? Is he a big still processing fan? Did he like Grantland? Well, I should say, when I signed on to do this show,

I somewhat naive, I now can say naively, believed that what the show was gonna be was me talking to Stevie Wonder for six episodes. I know. How quickly did you realize that that wasn't gonna be the case? Oh, well before we got near a studio. Well before we even had our first meeting.

And why was that? I don't know. I know now that we've made the show that this is a much, much, much different show than me talking to Stevie Wonder about these songs. And I don't think I would be the right person to do that work, honestly. Like the problem with me as an interviewer sometimes, especially with a person like Stevie Wonder is I already know how I feel. I know what this work is doing.

I would benefit from some, I mean, to hear someone like Questlove talk to Stevie Wonder is a completely different story, right? But by the way, I should note Questlove himself, who hosts the podcast, has never had Stevie Wonder on his show. It's just hard to do, Stevie's a... He's not even a... I mean, is he elusive? I wouldn't... He just... He speaks through the music. Music is his mode of communication. I don't think it really serves him intellectually to sit there and explain to you his songs. He did it! Why should he have to explain what he did? That's

where I come in. He could easily just be talking to Oprah every night if he wanted to, but I feel like the way that he feels his gift is in his functionality to use a terrible concept for Stevie Wonder. But like his purpose in this world is to spread love, joy, feelings, to rile through music. To sit in front of, sit in the studio and talk to an egghead like me, it doesn't, it doesn't do what he wants to be doing with his life and his talent and his time. Michelle Obama, who's now his friend, said that talking to Stevie Wonder on the phone, which they do from time to time. She describes it as the Stevie you hear on the song as

from songs in the key of life, is the Stevie you get on the phone. Yes. Was that your experience with him? Yeah. I mean, he also, he's so human. What do you mean by that? You know, he's got a set of emotions

that characterize his personality. You know, he's got a set of emotions that characterize his personality. You know, when you and I talk, Sam, there are things I'm eager to talk about, and there are things that, like, I mean, you rarely ask things, questions that I don't want to answer, but there's just, like, ways of thinking about yourself that aren't really fun. Like, for you to do a thing that you sometimes do, which is like read me back to me or something, I receive it because it's very kind and also it is illuminating. I did not have that experience with Stevie Wonder.

I think that it was funny, like the, you know, Barack Obama and Stevie Wonder and I were sitting in a studio and this is for the bonus episode that will come out in December, unless you're an audible subscriber, which means you can hear it now. I mean, I think that our goal was to just try to like learn something about the experience that the president and I had just had having these conversations about this music. And even for President Obama, like this is the music of his childhood. This is music that makes him him.

You ask what my experience what you know What Stevie Wonder means to me very different from what it means to Barack Obama where like he was Elemental a food group but also like a major cool older brother rock star sort of person and to sit in a room with that guy Is I mean I'm imputing feeling to the president, but it had to have been very special. I know for a fact that it was. Even though they're in each other's lives in some way, to sit there and interrogate him about his work on a microphone with Stevie Wonder sitting at a keyboard answering sometimes in song was not nothing. But, well, I can say for a fact that Stevie wouldn't have wanted to sit for six episodes

of a podcast about one of his great achievements because he didn't do it. There might not be a reason for him to go back. He's not a back-looker in that way. He's not a nostalgicist. He has written one nostalgic song in his entire career, and it's one of his best songs, but it also is pointed about remembering where we came from, and it's Sir Duke. Oh, two nostalgic songs. Sorry. I wish is the other one.

So you've made these six episodes in which you have looked back and looked forward. You spent three years with this material in and out of production. I know the show was originally called the Stevie years. Now it's the wonder of Stevie. Listen, you don't even want to talk about titles. I do want to talk about it because your former boss, Bill Simmons, he loves to talk about how in documentaries we are increasingly entering this hagiographic era. Yes, yes. And a large part of that is because the participation of the subject is often contingent on final

cut. Even your friend Ezra Edelman, who spent years making a documentary about Prince, is now himself facing a reality in which that movie may never come out because the estate has problems with it. How do you navigate that relationship on this show given Stevie's involvement? I'd never thought about it. It never came up once. And you know the thing that makes the answer to your question easy is that we are dealing with some of the greatest music ever recorded. This is not someone who has a track record of cruelty, abuse, racism, corruption. His music is the antidote to that, and it's not a smokescreen for behavior he was participating in that contradicts his brand, so to speak. You're referring to Prince in that?

No, I mean, not with all of those characterizations, but I mean, you know, the thing about Prince is that he was tough. He was really complicated and difficult to work with. And you know, Ezra wanted to make a movie about a person. We wanted to make a movie about a person who made great art. Ezra's mission was entirely different from ours. It's funny because I actually think that his Prince movie and our podcast, they're kind of weirdly in conversation with each other.

How do you mean? I think that, you know, and I mean this almost purely formally and how, from the standpoint of rigor, right? I'm still upset, for instance, that we do not talk about every single song on all five of these albums. I'm just, I'm still upset.

Like somebody reminded me the other day that we didn't really talk about I Wish. I wish we had talked about I Wish more. Like I think I mentioned it once. But you know, I wish we had spent more time on in music of my mind. But I think that the presiding thrill of the show, and I can say this as a person who's had to listen to it a lot, and I made it with Josh Gwynne who produced it and Janelle Anderson who produced it, and a bunch of really great musicians who made it sound great, these fantastic engineers. It just brought out the best in everybody. But we also just

wanted to make something that was worthy of the man and the music itself. And I think this show, it achieves that. And I think Ezra wanted to make something that really got to the bottom of a person that we've never really thought about as a complex human being. Because the music was so good that it obscured the person in a lot of ways and he was such an outsize

You know iconic, you know my my metric for how famous are you is Can you be recognized in silhouette form? Is there a silhouette version of you or people are just like yep? That's Prince Yep, that's Stevie Wonder. Yep, that's Michael Jackson. Yep, that's Michael Jordan. Is that Dolly Parton? I think it is. I think that that is true icon status when there is iconography that says this is you. I can't wait until the next podcast you do and the cover art is a silhouette of you. BOWEN LAUGHS BOWEN I don't think that I have a very distinctive silhouette, to be honest. But I also, I mean, just like, we're out,

we're running out of those, honestly, truly. I mean, but anyway, the point is basically that Prince's silhouette ostensibly obscures and penumbrates all the things that make him human. And Ezra, I mean, he spends nine hours, basically, discovering, extracting, listening to people talk about Prince's humanity, and it's just, it is, I mean, it's a great achievement, and, you know,

a crime that we might not ever see it. Well, before people hear the pilot of this episode, I want to ask you one or two more things. You spent all this time with the material, all this time thinking about Stevie, talking to his collaborators, talking to the Obamas about Stevie, talking to Stevie himself. In that time, now that the show is out and no longer only yours, has your relationship to him changed? Oh, of course. I mean, it's deeper. I mean, I really, really feel like I understand this music in a way that I hadn't previously. And this was music I knew right before we started. What do you hold more dear about the music now, that classic period between 72 and 76?

It changed music in an interesting way. Like it's not like Giorgio Moroder in Kraftwerk kind of pushing us toward electronic music. But Stevie Wonder definitely is alongside Marauder and Kraftwerk pushing, pushing, pushing, using this technology to find new ways of expression. He meant a lot to a lot of people and not for no reason and I think that he is important to our understanding of ourselves and he should be as important to our understanding of ourselves as someone like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and Medgar Evers.

He is a civil rights hero, but he also is something, he's in some ways a product of the movement in that, you know, his music realized, you know, one of the early hopes of the movement, which was to bring people together, to share humanity, and to acknowledge an equality among us. I think that was something I'd never really considered before. The idea that I'm comparing Stevie Wonder to Martin Luther King and meaning it and not hedging, I don't think I could have done that before I made this show. So that's a deepening.

But also just like as music, oh my God. Unbelievable. I'll never hear, I mean, I forced myself to pick a favorite album. Of those five. Of those five. Do you wanna share it? Oh, it's episode four, fulfilling this first finale, where I do declare that it's my favorite

of these five albums. This is mad, man. I almost threw my phone when I heard this. I mean, I'm sure a lot of people will. What's yours? Music of my mind. Oh, well, that's, I mean, that's still not the other three. It's not.

Or the two that everybody recognizes as their favorite, Intervisions or. Songs in the Key of Life is not fair. Songs in the Key of Life. It's basically two records. It is two records. I can't choose that. Right, no, I agree with you,

but we're in a strong minority. Right. Music of my mind sometimes is really number two because it's musically the densest, richest, most playful musically and, you know, personality-wise of the five. It's the one where he's figuring out how to use this synthesizer technology. And it's the one where you can hear him expressing emancipation from Barry Gordy's, you know, from getting under Barry Gordy's thumb in ways that only a 21-year-old would or could by like being lusty and saying the N-word and, you know, doing things that, you know, he couldn't do running around the offices of Motown as a kid.

The nine songs on that album, they're all, every single one of them is a soupy chowdery gem. This is a person who is not done. He still wants to be making music that is speaking to the thing that is most important to him and is never going to not be important, which is like, we need to get our shit together and fix this place and hurry up. Steve, you may not want to hear about this great streak, but I thoroughly enjoyed hearing it and I think our listeners will be excited to hear it.

This is an earnest question to end. I love this show because it's the freest face to be earnest, honestly. I always say this to you. It's like, you know, I have a real therapist and sometimes you. The question is, in this moment, as he's on this tour, I asked you about whether people can hear the music.

But the real question is, can they hear the message? You know, people, I don't know. I really don't know. I mean, well, I will say that one thing about this show is that even for me listening to it, I'm like, oh, I forgot that I thought that. That is a really interesting insight. Yolanda Adams, who's one of the guests on the show, you know, Rick McLaughlin has every single one of these people, Michelle Obama, Barack Obama, Janelle Monáe, so many of the

other people, you know, I mentioned Rick, Alex Pappadim is Questlove. There's so much insight here about people's personal relationship to this man and his music. I think it'll be instructive for people to hear this music in a deeper, more conscious way, and it will no longer be passive. I don't know if people can hear the message, but I think a show like this will lead them toward it. Well, I thank you for that. And, um, as always, I appreciate you sitting and talking,

even if it feels vaguely like therapy. I love therapy, please. I mean, don't misunderstand. Ernestness, therapy, I love it.