Stevie Wonder
Songs In The Key Of Life

Spring of 1977. A thirteen-year-old, already a bit grown-up, enters the only bar in his town where there's a jukebox and a pool table. The middle school exam approaches menacingly, and that small bar with the pergola is the right place to enjoy a well-deserved rest after studying (oh yes, back then, people even studied for this exam).
Before showing off his early talents as a hitter, he decides to invest the classic 50 lire to choose three songs that can suitably accompany his performance. Scrolling through singers and titles, his attention is caught by the name of an American artist he's sure he's heard on the radio: Stevie Wonder, that one from "Supertiscion", recalls the lanky teenager. He had listened to the song a couple of times fleetingly, but it was enough to imprint it in his memory: the voice and rhythm are unforgettable.
Sure, let's give this old stuff a shake, he thinks, let's see how this "Isn't She Lovely" is; and in the meantime, he prepares to see the effect it will have on his companions, ready to display the expression of someone who knows their stuff, who gets it. But, surprisingly, out comes from the blown speakers of the cumbersome box the clear cry of a baby: it's a moment, but enough to spark hilarity among patrons and mates, who tease and protest, invoking, poor them, the Collage, the Homo Sapiens or, at most, the hit of the moment, "Ti amo". Stricken in pride, the boy stands aside. But a couple of minutes are enough to be captivated by that enchanting, warm, vital music, which he doesn’t yet know to call Soul; and then the unmistakable and heavenly sound of that harmonica remains in his ears, accompanying him until the moment of sleep.
After that day, Stevie "Wonder" will almost never be missing from one of his three choices; sometimes even a trio, with "Sir Duke" and "I Wish".

The "Songs in the Key of Life," as you've understood, changed the "tonality" of my musical existence, and I can say that from that day, black music became indispensable for me.
Yet, only a couple of decades after that spring of '77 did I understand the fundamental importance of this album, which rivals in depth with that of Marvin Gaye, after the passion ignited that day drove me to learn a bit of the history of that genre. I don’t think I'm wrong in saying that with this work, Wonder leads soul music into a new era, without letting the best characteristics of the "music of the soul" get lost. An intelligent "revolution," therefore, that slots into the groove Gaye had so brilliantly charted and that nobody, or almost nobody, had been up to following.
Let's be clear, there have been excellent soul performances between "What's Going On" and "Songs in Key...", indeed. I mention two for all: those of Bobby Womack and Bill Withers.
But that sound tuned to the wavelength in the new metropolitan context, that grafting of social themes onto the sweetnesses of the black, that awareness of being able to be a point of reference for blacks in America and not just an idol, unite more than evidently and make special the albums of the two great artists with such acute sensitivity as similar. An operation of the same magnitude, if I may make the comparison, had been completed by Miles Davis in the jazz field.

Tracks like the already mentioned "Isn't She Lovely", "I Wish", and "Sir Duke", like "As", "Contusion", "Pastime Paradise", "Ordinary Pain", besides the "phosphorescent" and never conventional ballads like "Village Ghetto Land" (chamber music + soul), "Summer Soft", "Joy Inside My Tears", completely redraw the boundaries and aspirations of pop-black music, reaching levels that only a few subsequently will be able to approach.
At the time, Wonder had already churned out masterpieces like "Music On My Mind" and "Innervision", but the grandeur of the project (two LPs + 1 EP), the astonishing creative streak, as well as the ability to hold together so many "threads" in a marvelous and, perhaps, unrepeatable, balance make "Songs In The Key..." a tapestry as imposing as it is enjoyable.