The 1972 album Stevie Wonder rushed and regretted: “Weird shit”
Time is often in short supply within the endlessly shifting realm of the music industry, and while an artist as accomplished as Stevie Wonder has surely earned the right to take his time when recording new material, that wasn’t always the case.
Motown Records is famed for a lot of things, but creating a stress-free atmosphere in the corridors of Hitsville USA certainly wasn’t one of its strong suits. Particularly during the 1960s golden age of Berry Gordy’s label, when its output commanded the attention of the weekly pop charts like nothing else, Motown’s recording process increasingly evoked the assembly-line production of the nearby automotive factories in Detroit.
There was little time for dilly-dallying, and Motown artists were, by and large, treated like musical machines. Having been signed up to the label since the age of 11, Wonder became pretty quickly accustomed to that way of working.
As the songwriter matured, though, that high-pressure environment didn’t leave him a lot of room for the creative freedom that would eventually produce Songs In The Key of Life, Talking Book, or Innervisions – in other words, some of the greatest albums ever recorded. Wonder’s watershed moment came in the early 1970s, when he was finally able to re-negotiate his contract with Motown.
Even at that time, the label was already becoming famous for its incredibly restrictive contracts, which typically gave creative control not to the artists themselves but to Berry Gordy… It is no wonder that so many departures from the label coincided with legal action over contracts and royalties. However, Wonder was able to wager his talents and score a deal that finally gave him full creative freedom over his own work.
Music of My Mind was the first album to be released from this bold new era, and the difference between that 1972 record and its predecessor, Where I’m Coming From, is utterly unavoidable. Then again, Wonder himself has routinely criticised Where I’m Coming From, viewing it almost as a contractual obligation to Motown before that famous renegotiation.
During a 1973 interview with Rolling Stone, he recalled just how rushed the 1971 record was: “We did Where I’m Coming From – that was kinda premature to some extent, but I wanted to express myself,” he shared. It is, on one hand, telling of Wonder’s musical mastery that even his rushed albums are far superior to records that other artists spend their whole lives working on. Nevertheless, Wonder does seem to regret not taking his time on the album.
“A lot of it now I’d probably remix,” he admitted. Still, even he could admit that the record had more than a few highlights: “But ‘Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer’ came from that album, and ‘If You Really Love Me’…but it’s nothing like the things I write now.” Summarising his mid-1970s writing process, the songwriter concluded, “I love gettin’ into just as much weird shit as possible.”
Where I’m Coming From might have been lacking in “weird shit” to an extent, but it did at least fulfil Wonder’s contractual obligations to Motown, allowing him to renegotiate and usher in an expansive new era for the songwriter that produced a litany of his greatest and most experimental works.
