![]() When Innervisions was released in August of 1973 Stevie Wonder had clearly attained a new creative level that saw him able to write about complex social and personal issues in a more expansive, spiritual and mature way with the confidence that his audience would follow him on his adventure of discovery and fulfilment. Another album of strong material that further reflected his complex and varied artistic sensibilities, Talking Book, did much to introduce Wonder to a wider rock audience, a move that gained more momentum when around its release he toured with The Rolling Stones and played to huge, appreciative audiences. 1 in the US, was followed by the superb Talking Book album, the opening track of which was the follow-up single, ‘You Are The Sunshine Of My Life’, which settled at No. The following year indeed marked the beginning of his ‘classic seventies’ period of four albums that not only established Wonder as a major artist but changed the face of pop/soul music and influenced its future in unprecedented ways. It was a skill that Wonder further developed and honed to spectacular effect. He resigned in March 1972 and two months later released Music Of My Mind, an album that fully reflected his newly-gained artistic licence and demonstrated his ability to experiment and fuse different styles of music in an adventurous way whilst still retaining a keen commercial sensibility. In September he married Syreeta Wright and there followed a quiet spell while he let his Motown contract expire and then renegotiated it on terms that gave him almost total artistic control over the music he would release and a much greater degree of business independence. Also in that period, his My Cherie Amour album charted and he somehow found time to write the music for hit singles, such as the Smokey Robinson classic ‘Tears Of A Clown’, for some of his fellow Motown artists! 6) and ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours)’ (No. ![]() 14), ‘Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday’ (No. 3), ‘I Don’t Know Why (I Love You)’/’My Cherie Amour’ (No. 5 hit with ‘I Was Made To Love Her’ and after a somewhat premature Greatest Hits compilation album charted in the autumn of 1968 he enjoyed an 18-month run of five Top 20 UK singles – ‘For Once In My Life’ (No. Stevie Wonder burst into pop consciousness here in January 1966 with ‘Uptight (Everything’s Alright)’, which made the Top 20, and although his US hit cover of Dylan‘s ‘Blowin In The Wind’ didn’t catch on he was soon in the UK Top 20 again with ‘A Place In The Sun’. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a presentiment of further immediate success and after an album of mostly covers “With A Song in My Heart” flopped he dropped the ‘little’ from his name and set about writing his way into music history. His early records were fairly inauspicious but in August 1963 he had a sudden double success in the US when a single, ‘Fingertips Pt.2’, and a boldly-titled album, The 12-Year-Old Genius (Recorded Live), both reached No. As early as 11 years of age his talent came to the notice of Ronnie White of The Miracles who alerted Berry Gordy at Motown and Gordy duly signed him and renamed him Little Stevie Wonder. Brought up in Detroit he learned to play a variety of instruments as a child as well as sing in the church choir. Stevie Wonder is not just a huge figure in music he is one of the 20 th century’s most consistently brilliant artists.īorn in Saginaw, Michigan, Wonder was blind shortly after birth. By 1973 he was the most experimental and ambitious black artist working in pop music and had extended the boundaries of that genre through his unique fusions of soul, jazz and rock, all the while writing material of a social and political nature, alongside songs of the heart. When Stevie Wonder released his landmark album, Innervisions, 40 years ago, in August 1973, he had already made 15 albums and had a decade of chart success both in the UK and the US. From his beginnings as Little Stevie, before he was even a teenager, to his groundbreaking 1970s albums that took black music into a whole new direction, allowing so many that followed him to break out of the strictures of what record companies considered ‘soul music.’ Few artists have had such a diverse and far-reaching impact on music as Stevie Wonder.
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