October 3, 2026

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by Ann Powers

This week, our critic celebrates the expansion of one of the most beloved albums of all time.

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Hello love physicians,

I hope that you woke up last Monday morning, as I did, to a blast of delight from your internet portal instead of the usual downpour of slop and doom. If so, I hope you thanked Stevie Wonder. At 4:54 a.m. — the time that he’d often call it quits in the studio while making his 1976 opus Songs in the Key of Life — Wonder released four songs from those sessions, a very rare drop from a man who holds the key to his vaults in a tight grip. Even better, as fans awakened to fresh sounds from the Dream Machine, they discovered that these weren’t just demos or reworkings but fully fleshed out numbers that could have found a place on the masterpiece itself. “The EP features four absolute bangers!” the critic Simon Sweetman wrote in his newsletter.

As a Wonder believer who will stand up in any fight to declare him the best musician alive, I agree that Songs in the Key of Life - The EP stands respectably next to the legendary double LP that spawned it. It’s fun to think about where each song might have fit within its 105 minutes of funk, soul and sweetness. The playful, synth-y “It’s Easier” syncs up musically with “Ebony Eyes” and “All Day Sucker” but forms a better story arc next to “Ordinary Pain.” The lightly Latin fantasia “My Life Story of Love” makes me want to resequence sides one and two, moving “I Wish” back and putting this track before “Knocks Me Off My Feet” on the flip. “I Can See the Sun in Late December” might have offered a breath after the Biblical epic “As” and before the trippy “Saturn.” (In fact, though I haven’t seen anyone note this, Wonder gave “I Can See the Sun in Late December” to his friend Roberta Flack, who recorded a 13-minute version for her 1975 album Feel Like Makin’ Love, a take wrapped in winter’s grey light.) As I bounced around to the P-Funk nod “I’m Into Livin’,” I thought about how different Songs in the Key of Life would land if that flashy strut had kicked off the album instead of the lofty “Love’s In Need of Love Today.” These are the games a Stevie fan can play, because during his imperial 1970s run the man never released a song you wouldn’t want to hear as part of your favorite album, the one you spin at least once a week throughout your life.

I feel gratitude toward Wonder frequently, for all the great music he’s offered; a day spent diving back into his crowning 1970s achievement showed me that this album has wisdom to share that feels very immediate. What current listeners can learn by returning to Songs in the Key of Life is that “songs” and “vibes” need not be separated. Often in this era of lean-back listening, the time-honored methods of songwriting success — crafting hooky melodies, meaningful or at least memorable lyrics and a certain clarity of purpose within a production — are often sacrificed in the quest to evoke something more nebulous: a mood, a wave of nostalgia, a sound that orients a listener within time and space without demanding much interaction. (The philosopher Robin James defines a vibe as “how we perceive ourselves the way algorithms perceive us.”) Many pop-culture observers feel that vibes have now replaced more solid, individuated, clearly directed cultural forms — we are awash in feeling and perception but ideas and clear narratives are on the wane.

Songs in the Key of Life shows that a truly ambitious musician can bridge the gap. So many its hits stand as central texts relating of the story of Black American life, and of the 1970s as a transitional decade, in ways that have become canonical: the history lessons of “Sir Duke” and “Black Man” parallel the personal stories in “I Wish” and “Isn’t She Lovely,” while epic tracks like “As” expand beyond the personal to ponder existence itself. These threads intertwine musically through the blend of electronic elements and jazz instrumentation, with harp, horns and harmonica, clavinet and congas contributing to Wonder’s project of building a diasporic universal sound. The vibe of Songs in the Key of Life is unmistakable, but its messages speak loudly within its aesthetic and demand a response: physical, emotional, social. The stories told and the range of feeling the music produces carry equal weight, all serving the idea of uplift as activism, of expressiveness as the root of full humanity.

While the profundity of Stevie Wonder’s art cannot be doubted, his playfulness is equally important. Songs unfolds like a game of life, actually quite a bit like The Game of Life, the once-ubiquitous Milton-Bradley board game with its winding roads and detours determined by the spin of a colorful wheel. Wonder’s well-documented musical perfectionism has always operated in tandem with his buoyant imagination, which has carried him from romantic idylls to interplanetary journeys to vividly detailed portraits of social injustice without a worry about how these paths intersect.

Taking two years to record Songs in the Key of Life and enlisting a mind-boggling 130 collaborators (including fellow legends Herbie Hancock, George Benson, Minnie Riperton, Bobbye Hall, Dorothy Ashby and “Sneaky Pete” Kleinow, who added twang to “Ebony Eyes” with his steel guitar), Wonder took on “the concept of life in as many facets as we could cover in one album,” as he told Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times. His goal was to show “how very much we all have in common,” he continued, to “help break down some of the stereotypes that are used to separate people.” The Walt Whitman of the Top 40, Stevie saw no contradiction in calling for unity while fearlessly deploring the effects of impoverishment on “Village Ghetto Land” and historical whitewashing on “Black Man.” His optimism could feel unbound, even speculative, as on “I Am Singing,” his multilingual, superior precursor to “We Are the World”; then he’d turn heel, pursued by heartbreak, as he does in “Another Star.”

In the world of Wonder, the cosmic, the political and the personal are inseparable, all energies coursing through the same circulatory system. It’s all about identifying and directing the interplay of those elements, an enterprise as potentially life-changing as it is personal.

Returning to Songs with even more music to enrich an already sublime listening experience, I am reminded of the revolutionary nature of joy: something often reduced to a slogan on a t-shirt today, but key to Wonder’s genius and to the Black diasporic cultural lineage his music celebrates and upholds. Joy goes beyond mere pleasure or simple satisfaction. It can overtake a person as she goes about her daily routine, but it’s always a special event.

Songs in the Key of Life makes a case for joy, for its energizing power and the freedom at its center. The album also makes room for plenty of sadness, anger and fear, but it's Wonder’s commitment to working through those emotions and finding the road to take to a better resolution that makes so many of us return to it again and again. In his music, he was already ready to try a new way to spin the wheel; when I listen to it I always feel his insistence that something beautiful is always on the horizon. I’m just happy he’s still here to remind us.

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Here are a few other things that took me higher this week

Spooky season is all over streaming services now, and I’m committing to watching at least two horror movies a week until the trick-or-treaters come. I just watched and dug Backrooms, so I’ll be checking out The Hitcher, The Wailing and Possession (RIP Sam Neill) on Criterion, Hokum on Hulu, and The Cycle on Shudder. And I think it’s time for me to finally succumb to Cocaine Bear, coming to Netflix mid-month. Here is a useful list of most of this year’s online horror offerings.
After all that screaming I’m going to need to chill, and I plan to turn to the hazy-sweet new album from psychedelic revivalists Suns of Sevilla, It Could Be Today.
Also excellent autumnal listening: jazz drummer and composer Jeremy Cunningham’s meditative, emotional Passing Fires, inspired by family stories and his interactions with dear friends — many of whom happen to be amazing players and guests on the album, including Jeff Parker, Makaya McCraven and Sen Morimoto.
I’m still collecting videos of musicians wearing costumes in pastoral settings, like this charmer from Tele Novella and this majestic banger from Danielle Ponder, whose amazing new album drops next week.
It’s time to make apple cake.

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