Songs In The Key Of Life by Stevie Wonder

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What separates Songs in the Key of Life from even the best records of its era is that it manages to be impossibly grand in its ambitions and deeply, intimately human in its execution. It moves from social commentary to domestic tenderness, from historical reckoning to pure, uncomplicated joy, and it does all of this without ever feeling like a lecture or a survey course. The emotional register shifts constantly, but the humanity at the centre of it never wavers. 

The music itself operates on a level of technical mastery that staggers even now. Wonder played the majority of instruments himself, orchestrated over 130 musicians, and pioneered the use of the Yamaha GX-1 synthesizer to construct orchestral textures that no one had heard in popular music before. He incorporated funk, jazz, Latin rhythms, gospel, classical influences, and pure pop songcraft, not as a display of eclecticism for its own sake, but because the subject — life itself — demanded that kind of range. The title was both a description and a dare: he challenged himself to write as many different things as he could, to cover as much of the human experience as the format would allow.

Featured songs:

Have A Talk With God
Sir Duke
Village Ghetto Land
I Wish
Pastime Paradise
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