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thoroughly coherent, and it establishes Stevie Wonder as a mature soul art-
ist. Perhaps because he was acting as his own producer on the track and had
a vision for how his voice should be presented to its best effect, Wonder the
singer sounds very different on this track than he had on earlier high-energy
songs. He sings here with a gospel-like feeling even doing some throaty
octave-jumping screams sounding more like a Philadelphia-style soul singer
than a Motown product. Further, every breath and every emotional gasp he
takes is audible. He would continue to make heavy use of close-miked voca-
bles in his even more funk-oriented recordings of the next couple of years.
This recorded vocal style clearly infl uenced Michael Jackson in the  Billie
Jean years of the early 1980s when Jackson was the acknowledged  King of
Pop. This aspect of Wonder s vocal production and performance style also
can be heard in some of Prince s 1980s recordings.
Paul Riser, one of Motown s most talented arrangers and orchestrators,
arranged the track. The use of the brass, in particular, greatly enhances the
recording. The other interesting feature of the arrangement that instantly
makes  Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I m Yours) stand out from other records
on the radio airwaves of 1970 is the ingenious use of a sitar-guitar in the
introduction. No, this is not the pure sitar music of the Indian subcontinent
or of George Harrison or other Ravi Shankar devotees it sounds more like
an instrument that was popular in the late 1960s, a guitar-based instrument
that played with the timbre of the pure-bred Indian instrument.
The lyrics of  Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I m Yours) present Wonder as
a more mature character than many of his earlier recordings did. No lon-
ger is he the child-man who has been wronged. In this song, he is the one
who has rejected his lover and is now back to beg for forgiveness. Although
this description might make it sound like a lyrical remake of the Tempta-
tions 1966 hit  Ain t Too Proud to Beg, composed by Brian Holland and
Norman Whitfield, it is in theme only. The two Motown songs are so funda-
mentally different in musical approach that any thematic similarities between
the two songs in terms of basic premise probably would not occur to the
casual listener. An important feature that the two songs do share with regard
The Middle of the Road, 1968 1970 21
to lyrics, however, is worth noting. That is, the utter contriteness of the
character who sings the song. Both the Holland-Whitfield song and  Signed,
Sealed, Delivered (I m Yours) were highly successful commercially and both
continue to be heard on oldies radio even today. Contrast this to some of
the material Wonder was to write and record within two years specifically
several of the songs on his self-produced album Music of My Mind material
that would present the singer s character as anything but contrite. Songs with
a simple moral premise I realize the wrong I ve done, and now I m begging
for your forgiveness such as  Ain t Too Proud to Beg and  Signed, Sealed,
Delivered (I m Yours) made a greater connection with audiences (as mea-
sured by record sales) than the  superbad material Wonder was to record for
a fortunately very brief period.
 I Gotta Have a Song, a collaboration of Stevie Wonder, Don Hunter,
Lula Hardaway, and Paul Riser, finds the singer having lost at love; however,
if he has music, he just might get by. The premise of the lyrics certainly is
nothing new. Wonder s melody and harmony are pretty but are not par-
ticularly memorable. As a matter of fact, the average person would be hard
pressed to whistle or sing the tune after having heard the song even a few
times. Even though  I Gotta Have a Song is essentially album-filler mate-
rial, it is not without merit. For one thing, the music-conquers-all theme is
congruent with the public persona of Stevie Wonder, whom the American
public had seen growing up for eight years as an icon in the world of popular
music. And the song s harmony suggests the later  Golden Lady, which is a
far superior song melodically. Although  Golden Lady, a track on the 1973
Innervisions album, was written in its entirety by Wonder, the overall flow,
harmonic progression, and sunny feel of the lyrics owe more than a small
debt to  I Gotta Have a Song.
Signed, Sealed & Delivered featured two notable tracks in which Stevie
Wonder did not play a compositional role, but that show just what direc-
tion he was taking in pulling away from the mainstream and in establish-
ing themes for some of his later compositions:  We Can Work It Out and
 Heaven Help Us. John Lennon and Paul McCartney s  We Can Work It
Out had been a No. 1 pop hit for the Beatles at the tail end of 1965. Stevie
Wonder s 1970 version of the song begins with a distorted keyboard intro-
duction that serves to place the soulful arrangement squarely at the close of
the 1960s and the start of a new decade. Arranger and producer Wonder
squares out the quadruple-to-triple meter changes of the Beatles original
version of the song. But, this step was necessary to turn  We Can Work It
Out into a soul-Motown song. The amazing thing about Wonder s version
of the song is that it is fundamentally different from the original to the extent
that it becomes his own. In other words, if a listener did not know that this
was not a song composed by Motown staff or Stevie Wonder, the listener s
assumption would be that it was written especially for or by Wonder. In the
overall progression of Wonder s history of cover material by non-Motown
22 The Sound of Stevie Wonder
songwriters,  We Can Work It Out stands out as being particularly impor-
tant. The rocking soul of Wonder s arrangement, the extemporization in his
vocal performance, his harmonica solo, and, yes, that keyboard lick, tackle
head on questions about what direction his career would be taking. No, he
was not destined to become another Sammy Davis, Jr.
The other song not composed by Wonder on Signed, Sealed & Delivered
that deserves special attention is Ron Miller s  Heaven Help Us. Before
discussing the song and its place in Wonder s ongoing development as an art-
ist, it should be noted that the song s recording for the album was produced
by Ron Miller and Tom Baird and not by Wonder. This is important to note
when listening to the recording because it explains why the production style
differs so much from the Wonder-produced tracks on Signed, Sealed & Deliv-
ered. For one thing, Miller and Baird chose to use a huge orchestration, but
even more important, they bathe Wonder s lead vocal in studio reverbera-
tion. In short, it resembles the 1970 Motown production standards and not
the close-miked, no-studio-reverb vocal presentation preferred by Wonder in
his productions of the same time period. In short, some of the immediacy of
Stevie Wonder s voice is lost. This, however, detracts only a little from the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]