Songs In The Key Of Life [VINYL]
- Brand: Unbranded
Description
In such a feel-good closer, it's easy to forget this is another song longing for a lost loved one, like with Please Don't Go but in far more substantial form, but true to Stevie, he'll rarely finish an album without giving you something to ponder and smile about at the same time. The first of two big hit singles, Sir Duke, comes breezing in like a much needed breath of fresh air through its chanting trumpet and softly thudding bass drum introduction, with Sembello's acoustic guitar kicking off one of Stevie's most joyous and effervescent numbers, with appropriately jazzy chord changes and a horn section of tremendous drive accompanying a tune that the Duke himself would have been truly proud of. In another review I was snotty about Stevie Wonder's voice, which is unfair - no, it's not as good as Otis Redding's or Aretha Franklin's, but that just means it isn't sublime: it doesn't achieve the emotional depths of those two singers, but listen to the first track and you can hear its strengths and range.
Opening side three, Isn't She Lovely, the most famous and celebrated non-single, suffers from the same level of excess, and it's pretty clear that its popular acclaim is based on the much shorter radio edit which would have been a much better choice (even if that wasn't Stevie's doing, as he never wanted this released as a single to begin with). The best of the four, Saturn is about Stevie imagining escaping to a distant planet in the form of paradise to escape life's problems. In December 2013, Wonder did a live concert performance of the entire album at the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles. The album was viewed as a guided tour through a wide range of musical styles and the life and feelings of the artist.
Some would be sketched out, some were more finished than others and we just kept working until he had what he wanted. I once spoke to a card-carrying, venomously proud racist who believed three things - white people are a superior race, everybody in England should be forced to speak English and observe English customs (including the custom of being born here), and that Stevie Wonder was a legend. I'll give it three ½ stars, because there are in fact great songs which match the perfection of his earlier work; songs which are perfectly executed and their own best cover versions, so to speak: Pasttime Paradise, I Wish, Summer Soft, As, Ngiculela - these songs would have made a wonderful single album. Unfortunately we now hit the first rough patch of the album, and the first of three problematic songs which are the reason why this doesn't quite earn the high five, however wonderful they may be to begin with. Still prefer this 2CD version of the album for 2 reasons: 1) The remastered 2000 UMG reissue, Japan SHM imports, and even the limited Audio Fidelity gold disc release didn't use the 1st-gen master tapes apparently (later found out that Stevie actually kept those for himself, sad news for us fans who want to hear his albums the way he did in the studio during playback:::deep sigh:::).
The title makes it very self explanatory, and after almost 50 years later, it is still very relevant! was a unique year in Stevie's musical career - not only the first since 1965 that he had not produced a single album, but the first in which he released no music at all under his own name (he still wrote a few songs for other artists, those being Robert Flack and the Pointer Sisters among others), as 1965 had at least yielded the breakthrough single Uptight. Still this song's popularity is definitely justified; if its melody is a bit simple and repetitive for Stevie, he'd rarely sung with such warmth and joy in his celebration of one of God's greatest gifts, the birth of his first-born, heightened by some of his most captivating harmonica playing.Some CD editions have made the unwise choice of splitting this EP between the two discs, rather than appending all four songs to the end of disc two; Saturn seguing from Ordinary Pain just doesn't make sense and it surely was not how Stevie intended it. Who would have ever thought that a triple album would be the one of the best-flowing albums I have ever heard?
- Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
- EAN: 764486781913
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