To explain what Songs in the Key of Life means to me, I think it's best to start at the end. I have a vivid memory of cruising the nighted streets of New Orleans with my parents as the album's closing track, "Easy Goin' Evening (My Mama's Call)" played on the car stereo. Watching the lights & street life of that magical town float by as Stevie's layered harmonicas drifted through the speakers, I concluded that "Easy Goin' Evening" was the most perfect 4 minutes of music I had ever heard. (When I was a teenager, so many of those revelatory musical epiphanies seemed to happen in cars.) I had already been a Stevie Wonder fan for a year or so, but that was the moment I became a Stevie believer. Since then I've heard some to equal it, but I still think the 4 minutes of "Easy Goin' Evening" is absolute perfection. Not a note is out of place--even Stevie's lazy harmonica phrasing helps to convey the mood. But despite the fact that me from 20 years ago would have said this is blasphemy--in 2022 I do not believe that Songs in the Key of Life is a perfect album. But it is still the greatest album in the history of recorded music.
The album's imperfections pale into insignificance compared to its scope, ambition & sheer energy. Disc 1 contains the strongest & most stylistically diverse 6-song sequence ever, starting with the chamber music experiment of "Village Ghetto Land," diving breathlessly into the spiky jazz fusion & fiery Michael Sembello guitar work of "Contusion," the irresistibly danceable "Sir Duke," the walking-bass sophisticated funk of "I Wish," the buoyant love ballad "Knocks Me Off My Feet," & finishing with the searching, saturated bass, apocalyptic minor key strings & building choirs of "Pastime Paradise." After the rueful reprieve of "Summer Soft," we get what appears to be the album's simplest electric piano AM radio soul ballad in "Ordinary Pain," before the 2nd half explodes into an aggressive synthfunk "reply" to the A section's conventionalism.
Stevie's quiver is full of brilliant arrows, but I want to focus on 2 of them here. The songs are hills crowned by castles in the form of huge choruses. The verses often crescendo into the chorus, usually joined by backing choirs. Sometimes their magnificence seems to come out of nowhere (similar to another genre's master songwriter, Guy Clark). Stevie's writing gives the lie to the conventional wisdom that a great song needs a bridge. Although most of the songs have fairly conventional structures, there is not a bridge to be found on this album. Stevie turns verses into hooks & choruses into mood-shifting transitions, packing enough chord changes into both to eliminate the need for a bridge. I would call this a master-class in bravura, intuitive songwriting, except it's not a class because this kind of thing can't be taught. You can study all you want, but you can't learn to write songs like these. This isn't skill; this is genius.
As a performer, Stevie's musicianship is easy to overlook in favor of his vocal prowess. He knows exactly where to be smooth, where to be rough, where to hang back, Billie Holiday style, & when to charge ahead, with careful phrasing derived from the greatest vocalists in jazz, blues, rock & soul. Speaking of tone & phrasing, don't sleep on Stevie's harmonica playing either! The best demonstrations are in the aforementioned "Easy Goin' Evening" as well as "Isn't She Lovely," but it shows up on "Have a Talk With God" as well. I had the pleasure of seeing Stevie live on the Songs in the Key of Life tour back in 2015, & I got to see Stevie perform the most jaw-dropping improvised harmonica solo I've ever witnessed.
And now for the imperfections: just as the midsection of disc 1 brings a tidal wave of brilliance, disc 2 correspondingly sags in the middle. "Black Man"'s heart is in the right place but it is politically squishy--not to mention overlong, riding a rather bland funk groove through its meandering outro. The similarly well-intentioned but somnolent "Ngiculela – Es Una Historia – I Am Singing" & "If It's Magic" follow. Thankfully, this 3-song section is the closest thing the album has to a slump, as disk 2 comes roaring back to life with a pair of back-to-back epics driven by grand gospel choirs: "As" & "Another Star." The choral ecstasy on the former balances with Stevie's tasteful keyboard solos, & this is the only song where Stevie's secondary singing voice, the throaty growl, shows up for an entire verse.
Songs in the Key of Life is a good-natured, entertaining album on a surface level, but underneath there is a powerful statement being made about Blackness. The string quartet of "Village Ghetto Land" leverages the stereotype of chamber music as being the domain of rich white people, as Stevie describes the desperate conditions of poverty & forces the listener to contemplate how they can coexist with such beauty. He concludes with "Some folks say that we should be glad for what we have/Tell me, would you be happy in Village Ghetto Land?", reaching down to the lowest end of his range for a sarcastic phrasing of the word "glad." Later in the album, we get a gorgeous utopian answer to that song's despair in the form of "Saturn." Over a yearning electric bass & synthesized horns buoying the chemical chorus, Stevie tells of an idealized planet where peace & environmental sustainability reign: "We put back all the things we use." It's worth mentioning in the context of this song as a companion piece to "Village Ghetto Land" that prior to making this album, Stevie was seriously considering retiring from music & moving to Africa. Another celebration of Blackness comes near the end of the album with the stomping talk-box R&B of "Ebony Eyes," which makes a point of declaring that its beautiful subject was "born & raised on ghetto streets," again emphasizing the inner strength that comes from surviving adversity. "When she smiles it seems the stars all know, 'cuz 1 by 1 they start to light up the sky."
This is an album of contradictions, like the Twilight Zone intro: despair & hope, shadow & substance. It simultaneously can't wait to show you what's next, but also takes its time getting there. Songs in the Key of Life was the culmination of a 5-year period of sustained brilliance (most people say it starts with Music of My Mind & his new Motown contract, but I think it begins at the songwriting clinic that is Where I'm Coming From). Very few flames can burn that bright, that intensely, for that long. Stevie Wonder is a heavenly body, a cosmic entity with its own gravity. He is as old as the universe itself. His output starting in 1971 is a shooting star, a fiery stone erupting from the surface & screaming its way through the vacuum, headed for Earth. Songs in the Key of Life is where it landed.
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