Stevie Wonder, Song by Song

In September 2026 Songs in the Key of Life turned fifty, and Stevie Wonder announced he would play it in full in arenas across Europe and America. This is the story of the nine years that made it possible, told one recording at a time.

Between 1971 and 1980, Stevie Wonder did something the music industry had been built to prevent. At twenty-one he cancelled every contract he had signed as a child, walked away from Motown's assembly line, and came back with total control of his own recordings. What he did with it is eight albums that are still being argued about fifty years later.

A Promise Made Out Loud examines every one of those recordings in the order it appeared, in the tradition of Ian MacDonald's Revolution in the Head. Every song gets the facts of its making, the story behind it, what it is actually about, what the music is doing underneath the surface, and what was happening in the world outside the studio door.

Along the way it corrects a good deal of what everybody thinks they know. Jeff Beck does not play on "Superstition." The logging truck was probably empty. Four of these albums carry no American sales certification, and it has nothing to do with how they sold. "Knocks Me Off My Feet" is in C major, and what it hides under that unhurried surface would keep a conservatory busy. The plants album did not destroy his career, and the reasons it was rejected have less to do with plants than with what the industry had just stopped being willing to carry.

This is a book that takes the music seriously enough to say when a record is not good, and takes the politics seriously enough to explain why the angriest song of the decade was sung over a doo-wop chorus by the Jackson 5.

At its centre is one question. How did a man who described the American racial order more precisely than almost anyone still make music you cannot sit still to? The answer is that he refused, for nine years, to accept that a life divides into the part that matters and the part that is merely private.

A wish is private and costs nothing. A promise is made in public, to somebody, and can be held against you afterwards. For nine years Stevie Wonder made one, out loud, in a form you could dance to, on records that went to number one. This is the story of what it was and what it cost him.

Anybody can tell you the world is broken. It takes no particular gift and it costs nothing. What Wonder did was harder: he told you the world was broken, in more detail and with better evidence than almost anyone, and then he made you want to dance.