Stevie Wonder nearly quit music for Ghana, then made Songs in the Key of Life
In March 1975 Stevie Wonder was seriously planning to leave the music business and move to Ghana to help disabled children. Instead he signed the biggest recording contract yet, vanished into the studio, and emerged in September 1976 with a sprawling double album that debuted at number one.
Wonder had been on an astonishing run: Innervisions and Fulfillingness' First Finale won Album of the Year at the Grammys in 1974 and 1975. Plans for a farewell concert were already moving when he changed course and, on 5 August 1975, signed a seven-year, seven-album Motown deal worth $37 million with full artistic control. When Paul Simon collected the next Album of the Year, he joked that he should thank Wonder for not putting out a record.
The album was due around October 1975 but slipped as Wonder kept remixing, and Motown turned the wait into marketing with T-shirts reading We're almost finished. Most of it was cut at Crystal Sound in Hollywood. Wonder worked through meals and sleep; bassist Nathan Watts remembered reaching home at 3 am only to get a call summoning him back for I Wish. Some 130 people contributed, Herbie Hancock on Fender Rhodes and George Benson on guitar among them, and the working title Let's See Life the Way It Is gave way to the final name.
It landed on 28 September 1976 as two LPs plus a four-song bonus EP and a 24-page booklet, ranging across funk, jazz, progressive soul and pop, with songs about childhood, faith, parenthood and racial discrimination. On 8 October it entered the Billboard chart at number one, only the third album ever to do so after two by Elton John, and the first by an American. It held the top spot for 13 straight weeks, keeping Led Zeppelin and Rod Stewart off it, and both I Wish and Sir Duke topped the Hot 100.
When the 19th Grammy Awards came round, Wonder was in Nigeria exploring his musical heritage. A satellite link was supposed to let him accept, but the picture was poor and the sound inaudible, and Andy Williams asked the singer, blind since he was six weeks old, whether he could see them. He won four awards, Album of the Year among them. The Library of Congress added the record to the National Recording Registry in 2005.
Source: Songs in the Key of Life
