Stevie Wonder could probably build a sold-out arena tour setlist just by pulling song titles from a hat. Instead, when he returns to the road this fall, he's asking audiences to sit with one record piping into their eardrums.
Wonder has announced an 18-date tour celebrating the 50th anniversary of Songs in the Key of Life, beginning October 13 in Birmingham, England, before moving through Europe and eventually arriving in the United States for shows in New York, Chicago, Washington, Detroit and Los Angeles. Wonder will perform his album in full.
And with Songs in the Key of Life, that's quite an undertaking...
The original 1976 package contained two LPs plus a four-song bonus EP: 21 tracks stretching to roughly an hour and 45 minutes, moving between funk, jazz, soul, love songs, childhood memories, spirituality, and pointed examinations of race and inequality. Wonder wrote, composed, arranged and produced all 21 songs.
And they're some of the most classic and well-appreciated jazz, soul, pop songs ever written. Fifty years later, they still hit hard, and audiences want more time with them.
Let's talk about "albums" for a sec.
Albums haven't disappeared at all. Artists still make them, fans still love them, vinyl continues to give them a physical life and major releases can still feel like cultural events. But the dominant digital listening environment constantly encourages us to pull them apart.
The ability to sit and play a record from start to finish is increasingly complicated and difficult for some reason. It's not how we discover music, and sometimes how we discover is how we listen.
When a great song lands on a playlist, it's more common nowadays to attribute the playlist to that great pick, and stick with it versus seeking out the artist and album and hitting play on that instead. Then there's algorithmic autoplay, as soon as a great song hits your ears we've moved on to another artist, another sound, another set of metadata structures.
In other words, a listener discovers track seven without ever hearing track six. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Discovery has always changed with technology, and plenty of listeners eventually find entire albums because one song reached them first. But sequencing loses some of its authority, and its creative alchemy, along the way.
But Stevie has always organized songs, ideas, stories, and interwoven narratives, around not just the songs of his records but their sequencing too. Discussing Songs in the Key of Life, he later described its songs as snapshots of different times, places and emotions that belonged together, and specifically emphasized how conscious he was of an album's musical flow. His concerts on this upcoming tour will make that devilishly clear.
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Stevie has done this before...
This isn't an anniversary gimmick invented because Songs in the Key of Life happens to be turning 50. Wonder began performing the album in its entirety in 2013, initially making it the centerpiece of his annual House Full of Toys benefit concert in Los Angeles.
He then took the concept on the road beginning in 2014, building a major North American run around performing the record front to back. Those shows stretched to around three hours. Damn, Stevie...
Now, a decade older at age 76, he's returning to the same work. It's impressive on so many levels. But it also tells us that this is a formula he's not willing to let go of, and neither should we. Songs in the Key of Life is not really something that needs a revival, it's a repertory work.
An audience has to move through all of it together; and even though the record sequencing or songwriting doesn't change, the music always will. And the people inside the room always do.
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There was once a practical reason albums existed as albums. Music had to be packaged onto physical media. Records had sides. CDs had running times. Listeners bought the container and got everything inside it.
Streaming removed much of that necessity, but then what is the real role an album plays in today's listening culture? And what really holds songs together these days?
1976's Songs in the Key of Life provides a pretty persuasive answer. The record won Album of the Year at the Grammys, spent 14 weeks at No. 1 and entered the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry decades later. But its staying power isn't merely the result of containing exceptionally famous songs.
Its enormous range is part of what gives the individual songs their context, and it's also what makes it fantastic fodder for a live performance in full. The album format in this case acts not just like a container of disparate song visions, but a narrative that pulls it all together in a fluid momentum of music.
Don't skip these songs, and don't skip these events.
