“He raises our hopes”: Bono believes nobody can ever replace Stevie Wonder
There isn’t a single facet of rock and roll music that Bono has given his due respect to.
As much as people chastise the frontman for being one of the most pompous rock stars that the world has ever seen, the one thing you can’t say is that he isn’t willing to put his money where his mouth is, and even when working with the greatest artists of all time, he’s more than happy to honour them for making the finest music ever made. And while he never had the chance to work with some of his idols, like John Lennon, he could always use his position to remind everyone of the kind of heights that some singers reached years before his time.
But when talking about vocal performance, Bono wasn’t looking for a show-stopping singer by any means. Any casual music fan would usually think that the best singers of all time are the kind that you find on shows like The Voice, but not everyone needs a Whitney Houston-style range to reach the top of the charts. It’s about relating to the human on the other side of those speakers, and Bono felt that the best voices are the ones that shook people up when they heard them.
Bob Dylan wasn’t messing around when he first came out with his protest songs, and even back home in Ireland, Bono couldn’t get enough of the raw emotion dripping out of an album like Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. Which probably explains why a lot of his favourite artists are the ones that were willing to say something important with their music, like when Bruce Springsteen first started talking about trying to get out of his town in Asbury Park with the rest of the E Street Band.
While all of those singers had a lot of passion in their voices, not all of them were necessarily in the best mood when they were singing. Lennon’s ‘Mother’ is still one of the best performances he ever gave, but you can’t help but feel the pain in his voice. The same could be said of Dylan when working on records like Blood on the Tracks, but even among Bono’s record collection of dour songs, Stevie Wonder was like a ray of sunshine every time he came on the radio.
Even though Wonder has faced more than his fair share of hardship, you would never hear it in his music. A lot of the greatest songs on Talking Book and Songs in the Key of Life have joy spilling out of every instrument, and even though he doesn’t shy away from the dark side of life on tracks like ‘Village Ghetto Land’, he’s still willing to help change the world for the better through his music in any way he can.
And when Bono was working with Wonder on different charity shows, he felt that there was no one else who could have replaced what he could do whenever he got a crowd singing along with his music, saying, “[He is] the true disciple of ‘Sir Duke’. He raises our hopes when he raises his voice! There is only one!” Considering what Wonder could do on piano, though, that’s not simple lip service from Bono either.
Wonder was one of the greatest musicians to ever be considered a massive pop star, and even though he made the kind of songs that made everyone want to sing, no one could have figured out what he was doing. There was a lot of nuance going into a tune like ‘You Are the Sunshine of My Life’, and while Paul McCartney was able to work with Wonder on a few occasions, you could tell that even one of The Beatles was trying to play catch-up with what he could do half the time they jammed.
But beyond the strange chords or the harmonies that Wonder overlaid on everything, he will always be remembered for the way that he made everyone feel through his music. Whereas most people wanted to document their own struggles in song or talk about the reality of what was happening to their generation, Wonder was the one who managed to bottle up musical happiness and share it with the rest of the world.
