The specific window of creative output that Stevie Wonder produced between 1972 and 1976 — the four years that yielded Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, Fulfillingness’ First Finale, and Songs in the Key of Life — is the most concentrated period of musical achievement in the history of popular music, and the statement is not made casually or without awareness of the competition for that designation. It is made by people who have spent their professional lives engaging seriously with what popular music has produced and who return to this specific period and this specific body of work as the thing against which every other claim to that designation must be measured.
Wonder was 22 years old when Music of My Mind was released. He was 26 when Songs in the Key of Life was released. In those four years he wrote, produced, arranged, and played most of the instruments on five albums that individually would constitute distinguished careers and that together constitute something that has no adequate comparison in any genre of music.
1. Living for the City (1973)
A seven-minute narrative about poverty, racial injustice, and the specific machinery of a system designed to consume the people at its bottom — told through music that moves between gospel, soul, funk, and something that doesn’t have a name because it was invented for this specific song. The spoken word section in the middle — the bus trip, the arrest, the sentencing — is the most direct political statement Wonder has ever made in a studio recording and the one that the people who have studied his catalog most carefully return to as evidence that the common understanding of Wonder as a purveyor of warmth and joy is an incomplete account of what he actually was.
2. All In Love Is Fair (1973)
The counterpoint to Living for the City — a ballad of such restrained, perfect sadness that its placement on the same album as the political fury of the preceding track reveals the full scope of what Wonder was doing in this period. The song is about the loss of love framed as a matter of cosmic fairness — the idea that love’s end is not a failure but an inevitability, and that acceptance of that inevitability is a form of grace. The piano arrangement is his own. The vocal is a single take. The combination produces something that the word beautiful is insufficient for.
3. Golden Lady (1973)
The most musically complex track on Innervisions — a song of such harmonic sophistication that jazz musicians who have analyzed it have described it as containing chord progressions that the standard vocabulary of soul and pop music does not account for. Wonder was playing everything. The keyboard work, the bass, the drums — all of him, simultaneously, producing something that the musicians who have attempted to reproduce it have found more technically demanding than the recording suggests.
4. Ordinary Pain (1976)
From Songs in the Key of Life — a duet with Shirley Brewer that demonstrates the album’s extraordinary range by placing a piece of bitter, gospel-inflected relationship drama between the cosmic ambition of As and the pure joy of Sir Duke. Wonder has said the song came quickly — the specific anger in it arriving in a form that required very little revision because the feeling was too immediate to benefit from distance. The female vocal counterpoint that Brewer provides is the finest performance on an album full of extraordinary performances.
5. As (1976)
Eight minutes. A love song that expands the conventional statement of devotion across cosmic time — as long as blind men see, as long as hate knows love, until the rainbow burns the stars from the sky. The harmonic movement in the final section — the key changes that cascade through the song’s conclusion — is the thing that musicians who have studied the recording most carefully return to as the evidence that Wonder in this period was operating in a register that technical analysis alone cannot fully account for. Paul McCartney called it one of the greatest songs ever written. He has not revised this assessment.
Wonder is still alive. He has made music since 1976 that is good and sometimes great and that exists in permanent comparison to this four-year period in a way that makes the comparison unfair in both directions — unfair to the later work because the standard is impossible, and unfair to the earlier work because its singularity is diminished by treating it as a standard rather than as what it actually is, which is something that happened once, between 1972 and 1976, and has not happened again.