I Know More Than I Knew Then

One of Stevie Wonder's great virtues as a pop composer is the way he can make complicated music sound effortless—you may not necessarily notice how sneakily weird and ambitious some of his best songs are, indeed you're not supposed to. (I'm deliberately leaving aside the many cases where he's being openly un-pop, even borderline prog-rock: "Contusion," "Too High," "They Won't Go When I Go.")

Sometimes he lays the strange stuff right out on the surface of his most straightforward pop: the tritone substitution in the fourth bar of "You Are the Sunshine of My Life," or the slipping-sliding chromatic chords that unsettle the chorus ("you believe in things that you don't understand") in the otherwise rock-solid blues contours of "Superstition." Other times he goes on a clearly demarcated flight of harmonic fancy, as in the crazy instrumental break of "Living for the City," or doubles down on jagged jazz chords right in the midst of a funky breakdown, as in "Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing," or drives a soul ballad into a head-on collision with a jazz cadence, as in "Superwoman."

But sometimes the innovation is so subtle you may miss it unless you look under the hood. Take "Higher Ground," arguably the peak of his so-called classic period, in which an ideal balance of funk-rock, soul, and pop supported an ecstatic, impassioned, sometimes heady spiritualism and social conscience. It's the sound of a prophetic American voice finding its muse, its groove, its Platonic form. In this grateful ode to the upward climb afforded by reincarnation ("I'm so darn glad you let me try it again"), Wonder takes a classic blues idiom and lightly scrambles it, with revelatory effect. It starts in E-flat, and employs a classic blues figure I associate with harmonica or bottleneck slide guitar:

I ignited a spirited debate among some friends about whether the song could properly be said to be some kind of altered blues form, but to my ear it's in the ballpark, not only melodically (Stevie sings a G-flat, a minor-third, on "People," over the E-flat) but in the layout of the verse. Because after 8 bars of that E-flat figure under two echoing lyrical phrases ("People keep on learnin'/Soldiers keep on warrin' "), our ear is primed for the IV, or A-flat. But Stevie doesn't do that. He instead goes to an F major, the II of the home key, and even more ear-bendingly, he sings a G natural over it—just a half-step up from his "People" note, and forming a ninth feel over the F chord:

He does step up to the A-flat a few measures later (under the word "turning"), so it's almost like a gateway to the IV. But what a detour! I would say this unexpected progression—a modulation, you might even say—gives "World" an extra wild spin, like it's careening momentarily off its axis a bit. It's an association reinforced by its insistent repetition, as every verse concludes with the lyrics: "World keep on turnin'/'Cause it won't be too long." And that last line takes another unlikely but inevitable-seeming harmonic turn:

That's a bVII7 of the home key, for those playing at home. The song's banging chorus doesn't do anything out of the ordinary, though it does lean on that F major II again at a key juncture ("keep on tryin'..."), giving the whole thing an extra frisson.

I single this song out among Wonder's many brilliant compositions precisely because its innovations are so smoothly integrated into what sounds like a totally straightahead pop-rock jam that it's taken me decades of bopping along to it (but never playing it myself) before I noticed them. Hiding your intricate seamwork isn't the only definition of greatness, but it's certainly one of them, and it's one among many measures by which Stevie Wonder is among the best we've ever had.