Stevie Wonder Review: Full Performance of His Greatest Album Leaves Everyone Floored

Utilita Arena, Birmingham: On the opening night of Wonder tour, marking the 50th anniversary of Songs in the Key of Life, Stevie Wonder stuns audiences with lavish songs carrying urgent messages, seated amid a wall of keyboards. He says performing the album in full was a long-held dream: ...

Stevie Wonder, devoured by a set of keyboards, addresses the audience on the first date of his tour to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Songs in the Key of Life, his most famous album. Broadcasting it in its entirety like this was a long-held dream, he says: the problem was that it would take a lot of people to pull it off. He actually fulfilled that ambition a decade ago in North American arenas in 2014 and 2015, the gigs the 50th anniversary shows take their cues from - with the addition of Superstition as a screen - but that said, you have to take his word for it about the number of people involved.

There are really quite a lot of musicians up there: three percussionists, a string section, five brass players, six backing players, two guitar players, three keyboard players, including Wonder himself, who variously plays an assortment of vintage and modern synthesizers, a grand piano, an upright piano and, Ngiculela/Es Unzaraing, an instrument called Historirea/Es Unzara. The harp wasn't actually invented when Stevie Wonder released his last album, let alone when Songs in the Key of Life was made. Harpejii or not, this counts as a significant downgrade of everything compared to the actual album sessions. Composed by a man who could do almost everything himself, the recording included 108 musicians: eight credited for percussion.

Its lavishness speaks both to the commercial expectations of it and to its artistic challenge, which involves limiting what Wonder had recently achieved. Threatening to quit music entirely before it was made, Wonder reconsidered and in 1975 signed the biggest record deal in history, worth an estimated $230 million. And in the space of almost two years, Music of My Mind had released Talking Book, Innervisions and Fulfillingness First Finale, a brave display of talent so impressive that when Paul Simon won the 1976 Grammy for Best Album, his acceptance speech thanked Wonder for not releasing anything the previous year, thus giving others a chance.

The great thing about Songs in the Key of Life live isn't that it reminds you just how fantastic the next album was, which it is—which hardly needs highlighting, given that everyone from Michael Jackson to Elton John to George Michael has called it the greatest album ever made—but that it beautifies it. Not because of the extensive arrangements, although they are lovely: whether Village Ghetto Land would have been much improved by playing live strings instead of Wonder's stacked synths is a moot point, as the studio version was so incredible to begin with. That's because it's strictly a live performance, not a full recreation.

Wonder plays his harmonica solo on Easy Goin' Evening (My Mother's Call) and insists on rebooting Isn't She Lovely, unhappy with the early version (he cries "Stop it!". "Sue me!"). He also plays songs at will, the band locking in the hard funk of All Day Sucker and Black Man, adding to the album's already crowded tracklist. Its first half is now accompanied by another instrumental and also tied, Contusion-influenced jazz fusion. You could call it a jam full of call-and-response audience participation at a stretch, but its dramatic, symphonic spirit seems under-sold.

Despite its incredible reputation, performing Songs in the Key of Life live, more or less in order (and featuring four songs from the A Something's Extra EP that accompanied the original album), is a certain risk. It's risky because the album begins in a rather understated style: Love's In Need of Love Today, Have a Talk With God and Village Ghetto Land are incredible songs by any standard, but they're weak, dark, often desperate songs, reflective of someone who was too disillusioned in the mid-'70s, too disinterested in America to think too hard about his own work. The grand opening stunner you might expect from a stage show. In the Night, It Doesn't Matter, perhaps because the audience knows what to expect, perhaps because the poetry of a United States so desperately lacking in empathy, steeped in horrendous inequality and ruled by people whose actions it seems to have nothing to do with, might as well have been written in 2026.

They are ecstatic, though not as ecstatic as Sir Duke and I wish to be. In fact, you spend much of the show with your jaw on the floor. Even with its reputation, Songs in the Key of Life still has the ability to knock you to the side with the amazing level of quality it maintains throughout: this is an album whose deep cuts will foreshadow others: Saturn, Knocks Me Off My Feet, Joy Inside My Tears. As the latter's deep soul finally dies, a solemn voice is heard from behind the scenes. "That was really good," he exclaims, audibly stunned.