composed by Stevie Wonder
Innervisions is awfully close to a perfect album, but if Stevie Wonder really did peak in the ‘70s, I still could not tell you exactly where. Or why. But his voice draws the lines for me. Before it phlegmed up in the ‘80s (like Merle Haggard’s in the ‘70s) it was expressive like no other in American music and his songwriting more than paced it. Fulfillingness’ First Finale reaches so far in so many counterintuitive directions that it is still probably underrated (you might reach in a lot of directions yourself if you had recently survived a log crashing through your windshield on the freeway). Songs was strikingly different, insofar as its erratic long tracks took the most obvious implications of Wonder’s prior excursions and extruded them into endless refrains, jazzy guest soloists, shouted historical litanies and baby noises. But if not for that, he would not have come up with this unassuming masterpiece: a six-and-a-half minute adagio hymn over chromatic synth chords underlining one of Wonder’s most astonishing vocal extravaganzas, brimming with as much ambiguity and doubt as the wild devotion and uncanny alacrity that only come with (face it) knowing the gods love you.
Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.
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