World of Wonder
In Stevie we trust.
I’d believe in God too, if I were Stevie Wonder. How else to process the superhuman gifts you have been given? Without narcissism, can you really believe that all of this originates inside your mortal body? Without despair, can you believe that it will all go when you go?
He begins by thanking the Almighty, who speaks to him in song. And I think his God is not one for small talk. You could look at a career like his—an album virtually every year of the 1960s and ‘70s, a few in the ‘80s, two in the ‘90s (counting a soundtrack), and just one so far this millennium—and see a man slackening into wealth and leisure. Or you could see a man who steps into the public eye only when he has something to say.
What he has to say in 2024 is, per the unbelievable name of this tour, Sing Your Song! As We Fix Our Nation’s Broken Heart.
This is an allusion to his new single, “Can We Fix Our Nation’s Broken Heart,” which opens the show. It sounds like what you’d get if you could press an Auto-Generate Stevie Wonder Social Issue Ballad button, which is to say it’s pretty good. Lyrics generic, melody instantly encoded in your brain. Upon taking his seat, Stevie flutters his fingers over the little piano/guitar hybrid known as the Marcodi Harpejji to test the sound, and we all give a little gasp at the speed, complexity, and beauty of this quick warmup noodle. It’s as if a rare butterfly has just alit briefly on each of us.
In the press photos for this tour he greets us straight on, unsmiling, a weathered monument. But his performance Sunday night was neither sermon nor, despite his endorsement of Kamala Harris a few days before, political rally. There was political commentary of a sort. A pre-concert slideshow included voter registration QR codes accompanied by this quote:
“Lies never work so don’t believe them; vote with the consciousness of truth, freedom, and tomorrow.”
—Stevie Wonder
Lies never work! Incredible thing to assert. Stevie, of course lies SOMETIMES work, you want to wheedle. But perhaps in a deeper, spiritual sense, they do not.
Stevie’s word choices are often both odd and correct in this way. “I feel like people usually talk about healing a broken heart, not fixing it,” remarked my wife at one point. But healing might be left to happen naturally. It might take a long time. Healing won’t cut it. Stevie is ordering us to roll up our sleeves and fix this thing.
Onstage asides marked him down as pro-choice and anti-Musk. But the political talk was nearly free of proper nouns; Trump and Harris went alike unnamed. Stepping back into the public realm for Wonder seemed to be driven less by excitement for a particular candidate, and more by prosaic weariness and disgust with this retrograde chapter in our nation’s history. “I don’t want to go round in circles,” he remarked at one point. “Vote for unity … and not for bullshit,” was his closing salvo.
All this came between goofy blind-guy jokes, anecdotes about how his songs came to be (including a very funny Berry Gordy impression), and other varieties of genial patter that often seemed to be for his amusement as much as the crowd’s. He believes in a good time. He believes in America. He believes in evil, but he also gave the impression that the current evil on offer in America’s right wing was nearly too stupid to be dignified with words.
This is the sense in which I felt, Sunday night, that this man truly could fix America somehow. Because: can you imagine being casually loathed by Stevie Wonder? Would it not set you straight? Wouldn’t you know that the loathing must be utterly deserved, and change your life at once?
Part of this comes from his probably-a-pretty-good-guy aura. Along with God and Sam Cooke, on Sunday night he invoked (as you must, it’s Minneapolis and we were right across the street from First Avenue) Prince. This makes sense, of course: Prince being similarly polymathic, polymorphous, prolific; similarly a man of god and flesh mixed inextricably—Prince being Prince, Wonder being a man who has fathered nine children with five women.
One of the miracles of Stevie Wonder is that all the fame, skill, and creative ambition—not to mention the warping force of child stardom—reside within a man who seems to have made his way through the world with such good cheer and grace. Anyone who can write in so many genres and play so many instruments at a world-class level has some right to control freakery, and who knows, maybe the control freak is there behind the scenes; maybe one day we will learn things we’d rather not know about the relationships with those five women and nine children. But two of the children appeared with him on stage in Minneapolis, and he spoke fondly of past partners. At one point he began a sentence with, “You know, I’m a music lover…” The fact that he wasn’t trying to be funny made me laugh harder than anything else he said that night—the staggering humility, the unforced understatement.
Trying to fit these pieces together was one reason to see him in the flesh: to understand what the author of Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life could possibly be like as a human being.
The answer is someone a little looser and earthier than I expected, and someone who very seldom seems anywhere near 74 years old. From certain angles, smiling busily over the keyboard whose reflection gleams in his shades, you might easily shave 30 years off that figure. Yes, the voice is a little less supple. There was one song restart and a planned intermission to rest his throat, where he ceded the stage to some instrumentals and a brief guest act. (The guest, Sheléa McDonald, produced the kind of Mariah-esque vocal performance I’d have previously thought achievable only through studio magic, but also a too-explicit desperation for this platform to launch her to the level of fame she surely does deserve; you could feel the audience retracting its goodwill a few inches every time she tried to engage us with anything other than the liquid force of her voice.) Just about everything else is as you’d hear it on the records.
Better than the records at points. Onstage, the one-man studio band must be redistributed into other bodies—about 30 on Sunday, by my count. This came off as not a concession to the confines of time and space, but a source of new energy. A locally sourced string section was well used throughout, coming into full focus on “Village Ghetto Land.” A six-person choir of angels in black sequins proved infinitely superior to a chamber of multitracked Wonders. They elevated even the songs I never cared much about on record, particularly transforming “Love’s in Need of Love Today” into something haunting, genuine sorrow flowing from the rounds of “hate’s going round.”
But all these voices were still not quite enough for Stevie. The “your” in Sing Your Song! turned out to be important. I usually greet demands for audience participation with a heart of stone. When a performer tells me to clap my hands or sing along, the mule in me says: make me. But on Sunday I did everything Stevie asked of us with zero hesitation, even when he vastly overestimated our vocal talent and lyrical memory.
At least for one night, I would gladly fray my voice to be part of the kind of crowd Stevie Wonder imagines we can be. Personally I put no stock in unity (with its baked-in fear of dissent) as a political goal that is even desirable, much less achievable. Personally I shudder at Harris’s seeming conviction that unity is both desirable and achievable via a liberal glomming onto the center-right. And certainly, certainly, certainly one would like to see the man who stood against Jim Crow America and apartheid South Africa cry out explicitly against what has long passed beyond apartheid into genocide in Palestine.
But in the arena Sunday, you could see the appeal of a best-case idea of American unity. Families of three, possibly even four generations. Lots of interracial couples, including, beside us, a pair of bears and what seemed to be their respective feisty mothers. Everyone feeling it on the Jumbotron, everyone astonished and thrilled at the moment of understanding that they are on the Jumbotron (a very welcome distraction from the karaoke-screen-quality graphics that otherwise claimed screen space: palm trees, pink hearts, graffitied brick walls and other clip-art creations you have to imagine only a blind man could have approved).
Our seats were floor seats—specifically those narrow folding chairs locked together at the hip that make me cringe for anyone larger than myself, and also for myself. Everyone was on their feet from the moment Stevie took the stage, but this arrangement reduced most of us to a cramped, penguinish imitation of dancing. Luckier was a 40ish man in the row ahead, whose seatmates vanished at intermission and left him free to fully express his love of a mid-tempo Stevie jam, “Isn’t She Lovely” drawing the deepest-felt moves.
I was about to say that the setlist consisted mostly of the hits, but throw 20 darts into the catalog and what else are you likely to get? I was thrilled and unsurprised that we got “Sir Duke” and “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing” and “Superstition” and “Higher Ground,” thrilled and somewhat more surprised to get “Master Blaster (Jammin’).” The first time I paid deep attention to “Master Blaster,” it was beginning to seem like we were finally emerging from the worst of the pandemic, and the circumstances filled these lines with a current of convalescent wonder and relief that still, for me, carries the song beyond the artificial flavor of the ‘80s mainstream-reggae boom that birthed it:
Bet you nobody ever told you that you
Would be jammin' until the break of dawn!
Nobody ever told me that I would be jammin’ until 11:30 p.m. with this national treasure in the Target Center in 2024, that’s for sure. At several points in the night I thought: We don’t deserve Stevie Wonder. But isn’t it fun to imagine belonging to a nation that could?