Songs in the Key of Life Review

The production is the reason this is here. Wonder had been building records almost single handed since Music of My Mind, and by 1976 he could voice a string quartet on a Yamaha GX-1 and have it sound like grief rather than a preset. Village Ghetto Land is that trick used cruelly: a mock chamber arrangement, prim and pretty, under a lyric about rats and a dead man in the street. Pastime Paradise runs a synthesized string figure against Hare Krishna chanters and a gospel choir on the same chorus. Sir Duke and I Wish are horn charts written by a man who plays no horns and hears them better than people who do.

The writing keeps pace most of the time. Love's in Need of Love Today opens the album on a held chord and a plea. Black Man is a call and response history lesson with schoolchildren shouting the answers, which should be unbearable and is not. Isn't She Lovely is three and a half minutes of a father recording his daughter's bathwater, and he refused to cut it down for a single.

The honest flaw is length. A hundred and four minutes is more than any sequence can hold, the bonus EP is offcuts rather than a fifth side, and Ebony Eyes and Easy Goin' Evening would not survive on a single disc. It won Album of the Year, topped the Village Voice poll, and sits fourth on Rolling Stone's 2020 list. Sprawl and all, nothing else in soul reaches this far.