The albums Elvis Costello said were out of everyone’s league: “It’s unbelievable!
For any rock or pop artist, no matter how exquisite your work might be to your listeners, and regardless of how proud you might feel about what you’ve achieved, there’s always going to be one artist who you feel is still one step ahead of you.
In the case of Elvis Costello, who has not only endured a magnificent solo career but also been the leader of two separate bands in The Attractions and The Imposters, there’s a case to be made for the fact that large portions of his career are worth celebrating for their variety and exceptional songcraft. That being said, not everyone is in accordance with this line of thinking.
Not least Costello himself, who by his own admission, continues to be bowled over by the brilliance of a certain other artist whom he believes he’ll never be on the same level as, and whose entire career has been shaped by out-of-this-world compositions and musicality.
While stylistically far from a large amount of what Costello has aimed for as an artist himself, he’s always been enamoured with the work of Stevie Wonder, whether it’s the early soul records he released as a teenager or whether it’s the more progressive and expansive records he went on to make during his golden period in the 1970s.
Even outside the world in which Wonder operated, he’s amassed a number of devoted fans both in terms of general listeners and fellow artists, and because of how detailed and advanced his compositions became during the 1970s, several people tend to regard the string of records he released during this decade as being some of the greatest of all time.
Speaking about the soul legend, Costello claimed that there were two albums in particular that stood tall above the rest of Wonder’s output during this period, and that they’re the sort of benchmark records that everyone ought to aim for when creating something.
“Stevie Wonder was a harmonica protégé making instrumental records,” he said of his early career, before expressing an even greater disbelief at where he would go in the subsequent years. “He’s a great singer at 13 and then he makes Music of My Mind and Innervisions – it’s unbelievable!”
Costello continued to heap praise upon Wonder: “These are the kind of leaps, any time you feel yourself hemmed in, you just gotta look to the best stuff and hope that you’ve got the inspiration to go even a little bit to where they’ve managed. Nobody can make a record as good as Stevie Wonder made in those days. I don’t think so, anyway; nobody can make a leap like that now.”
While several other artists have attempted to make leaps in a similar vein, there are few who have managed to string together a sequence of releases as strong as the one Wonder produced from Music of My Mind up until Songs In The Key of Life, and that’s even missing out on some other extraordinary records that he made before and after. Wonder has always been a one-of-a-kind artist, and the signs that he’d endure a fruitful career were evident from the very beginning.
