The best Stevie Wonder albums
Perhaps the most incredible and adventurous soul artist to have ever lived, Stevie Wonder is a name that barely needs any introduction, whether you’re an aficionado or a novice when it comes to your knowledge of music. Having topped the singles charts in the US on eight occasions and released countless albums that are regarded as being among the greatest of all time, Wonder’s output is nothing short of exceptional, and now, at the age of 75, he’s been at the top of his game for over 60 years.
His remarkable career began at just the age of 11, when he was signed by Motown and put on their Tamla imprint for his earliest releases at the age of 12. In 1963, he scored his first number one single as ‘Little’ Stevie Wonder, with ‘Fingertips – Part 2’ thrusting him into the limelight. Not only did this preteen have immense talent as a vocalist, but he was also the harmonica player and bongo player on the track, which saw him working alongside Motown’s most celebrated musicians, such as James Jamerson and Marvin Gaye.
Normally, if someone has success at such a tender age, you’ll witness their career burn out just as quickly, but his work only became more exceptional and expansive as he grew older. Wonder arguably entered a golden era in the 1970s when he was still only in his 20s, releasing a string of miraculously brilliant albums that still stand up in quality today as being full of life and a desire to push funk and soul in a more experimental and progressive direction.
That’s not to say, however, that there isn’t plenty to be enjoyed from his catalogue outside of his work in this decade, and the impeccable musicianship that he demonstrated on his records from the start has always been one of the most compelling features of his work. Playing virtually everything from keys, synths, bass and drums, Wonder was a one-man band with an unmatchable talent, and had an ear for composition like no other.
Even with the lifelong affliction of blindness, he managed to overcome this disadvantage by consistently demonstrating that he was not to be dismissed as a gimmick. His lack of sight never stood in his way when it came to penning some of the finest pop songs ever heard, and never stopped him from pushing himself to write sprawling works of majesty.
While he has released 23 studio albums over the course of his enduring career, we’ve chosen to narrow things down to an essential six for anyone looking to dive beneath his singles catalogue and truly discover the beauty of Stevie Wonder’s mercurial talents.
The six greatest Stevie Wonder albums:
Stevie’s definitive best album: ‘Innervisions’
Release Date: August 1973 | Producer: Stevie Wonder, Malcolm Cecil & Robert Margouleff | Label: Tamla
By the time he was 23, Stevie Wonder had already established himself in a remarkable way. Not only had he stamped his authority on the singles charts, but proven himself to be capable of releasing albums of staggering quality, and the first album he put out after reaching this landmark age was the impeccable Innervisions.
The two albums from the year prior, Music of My Mind and Talking Book has already demonstrated his ambition to take things up a notch in terms of artistic daring, but Innervisions was arguably the masterpiece that tipped things over the edge. If you consider that Brian Wilson was 23 when The Beach Boys released their pop opus, Pet Sounds, then this is Wonder’s soul equivalent of this crowning achievement.
This is as perfect as things get in his catalogue, and over the course of nine songs, we’re treated to everything from stoned jazz (‘Too High’), to Latin music (‘Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing’), to a psychedelic civil rights anthem (‘Living For The City’). It’s the sort of album that’ll leave you speechless no matter how many times you dive in.
Defining track: ‘Living For The City’
Stevie’s first masterpiece album: ‘Music of My Mind’
Release Date: March 1972 | Producer: Stevie Wonder, Malcolm Cecil & Robert Margouleff | Label: Tamla
As mentioned, Wonder had already shown signs of elevating himself to the next level, and the first record on which he demonstrated this rapidly evolving artistry was Music of My Mind. It came out only 17 months prior to Innervisions, and remarkably, he managed to squeeze another sublime record out between the two.
His song structures were becoming more elaborate than before by this point, and songs were beginning to stretch out over multiple disparate sections, complete with ingenious key changes and chord sequences. What’s more, he virtually played everything on the record himself – a defining feature of his 1970s albums that made them uniquely his rather than having the fingerprints of someone else all over them.
The prime example of this expansion of his sound on Music of My Mind is ‘Superwoman’, an eight-minute epic that is perhaps one of his most underrated masterpieces, and as for the album itself, it’s the first of a slew of records that have virtually no flaws to speak of.
Defining track: ‘Superwoman’
Stevie’s most ambitious album: ‘Songs in the Key of Life’
Release Date: September 1976 | Producer: Stevie Wonder | Label: Tamla
When you’ve seemingly hit your creative apex, what do you do? If you’re Stevie Wonder, you go and release a double album that celebrates everything that you’ve done to date to cap off an exceptional run, of course. In 1976, Wonder released Songs in the Key of Life, which is perhaps his most acclaimed album, although it isn’t without a few slight bumps in the road.
A double album that mixes jazz fusion, gospel and his standard pop soul, he doesn’t shy away from stretching the songs out and letting loose. This is both to the album’s strength and detriment, as shifting from ‘Village Ghetto Land’ and its almost hymnal qualities to the outright chaos of ‘Contusion’ can be somewhat jarring, and songs like ‘Isn’t She Lovely’, while a massive hit for him, are extended a little beyond what’s justified on the album version.
That said, it’s a true rollercoaster of everything that Stevie is good at, and the full range of emotions on display from despair to elation are all present for you to absorb in all their glory. If Songs in the Key of Life is anything, it’s a major flex on all his other contemporaries, telling them that nobody can do it quite like him.
Defining track: ‘Joy Inside My Tears’
Stevie’s most experimental album: ‘Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through “The Secret Life of Plants”’
Release Date: October 1979 | Producer: Stevie Wonder | Label: Tamla
After Songs in the Key of Life, he took three years until the release of his next record; an unusually long amount of time for an artist so prolific. That album had been a double album and victory lap in essence for all of the extraordinary records that he’d put out over the course of the decade so far, but he had another double album up his sleeve.
The Secret Life of Plants is a complete overhaul of its predecessor’s sound, with Wonder opting to explore a love of new age music and utilising synthesisers to a different effect. Its soul roots are not completely absent, but it’s an album where Wonder chooses to offer up something completely new, and considering that large amounts of the album are either instrumental or feature the vocals of someone else, it’s very much the black sheep of his catalogue.
Despite this, the result is a completely unique album that still shows off Wonder’s unmatched songwriting talent, even if it is markedly different from anything else he’d ever attempted to make before, and the guest appearances from Syreeta and Yvonne Wright are a splendid touch to this surreal score.
Defining track: ‘Come Back as a Flower’
The best teenage Stevie Wonder album: ‘For Once in My Life’
Release Date: December 1968 | Producer: Stevie Wonder, Henry Cosby & Don Hunter | Label: Tamla
Yes, the 1970s may have been where the genius of Stevie Wonder came into full view, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t gems to be found among his earlier albums that he was releasing as a teenager in the 1960s. He was just as prolific in his early years as he was once he’d established himself as a master of the album format, and standing tall as his finest work from his adolescence is the 1968 album, For Once in My Life, which came out when Wonder was just 18.
He may not have written all of the material on this record or had quite the same degree of creative freedom as he was later given, but the performances are what makes it so special, and for a teenager to have this much soul and ebullient confidence in his ability is staggering.
It may not be an indicator of where things were heading in terms of his career trajectory, but it’s a brilliant pop record for its time, and is filled with many moments of wonder that make the listener realise that this wasn’t just a gradual rise to the top – he’d always been a prodigious talent.
Defining track: ‘For Once in My Life’
The best Stevie Wonder album for beginners: ‘Talking Book’
Release Date: October 1972 | Producer: Stevie Wonder, Malcolm Cecil & Robert Margouleff | Label: Tamla
Are you feeling as though this list hasn’t helped you decide where to start? Don’t worry, there’s one album that will help you get kick-started on your journey into the works of Stevie Wonder. Talking Book has virtually everything one could want as an entry point into his work; not only is it sonically ambitious, but it’s loaded with hits that you’ll probably already be familiar with.
‘Superstition’ and ‘You Are the Sunshine of My Life’ are two songs that barely need introduction, but so many other tracks on the album could’ve easily been hits, such as the gorgeous closing funk ballad ‘I Believe (When I Fall in Love It Will Be Forever)’ and the groove-laden ‘Tuesday Heartbreak’.
On the other end of the spectrum, there’s some exploratory jazz and funk tracks on here, and some wonderful cameos from other stellar musicians such as Jeff Beck and Ray Parker Jr, which show that Wonder wasn’t just an exceptional songwriter and musician, but could wrangle some of the biggest names in the business and get them to work their magic for him in exactly the way he wanted them to.
Defining track: ‘Tuesday Heartbreak’
