The album Stevie Wonder wished he could redo: “I wanted to express myself”
There were a number of years when Stevie Wonder didn’t have full creative control.
That was sort of the deal with having your debut at 12 years old. In fact, anyone who has ever been signed to Motown will probably wager that creative control isn’t something that you expect at the label, nor is it something that you’re especially aware of when you first get signed. In the beginning, it’s a mix of making ends meet and having a shot at getting your name up in lights – anything else is merely a bonus.
Things were similar for little Stevie Wonder. But they were also starkly different to many who had a shot on the same label. Because while others also had bags of talent, enough to make it the whole nine yards, few of them had the potential that Wonder did, the type that meant, at 13, he was the youngest artist to ever top the Billboard Hot 100.
However, things naturally started to lull the older that Wonder got, and the more he tried for better control of his own material. Motown might have lost its spark for him for a while, but going into his 20s, Wonder was starkly aware of how much he was in need of a new direction. As we’ve seen, Motown wasn’t the most open-minded when it came to new directions, especially with Berry Gordy at the helm.
But Wonder, knowing that his contract with Motown was about to become void after becoming a legal adult, decided to ride the wave with his thirteenth record, Where I’m Coming From. At 21 years old and knowing that there wouldn’t be a contract renewal, he took more liberties with the material, adding in socially conscious themes and messages without the label trying to control what he was doing in the studio.
While it was precisely what he felt he needed to do at the time, and a necessary precursor to everything he’d go on to do in his more experimental work, Wonder later reflected on the whole record as “premature”, likely due to his being set to a time frame with work that needed longer to simmer to reach its full potential. The record did well when it was released, but in terms of shelf life, Wonder feels he could have done a lot better.
As he later reflected to Rolling Stone, “We did Where I’m Coming From — that was kinda premature to some extent, but I wanted to express myself. A lot of it now I’d probably remix. 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.”
On the type of material he does now, he added: “I love gettin’ into just as much weird shit as possible.”
Despite the disdainful looks Wonder got from a select few during this period, it did pay off in the end. And it might not have been what Motown’s team wanted at the time, at least not to such a degree of boldness, but it was an inevitable path from the moment that 12-year-old Wonder wandered into their world. He wasn’t going to play the role of the sitting duck forever, and if he were anyone else, his pivot into creative freedom could have probably been a hell of a lot more provocative.
