Songs in the Key of Life

Songs in the Key of Life finds Stevie Wonder at the summit of the extraordinary creative run that began in 1972 — a two-record set plus a bonus EP that gathers nearly everything he'd been building toward, and which critics on both sides of the Atlantic treat as the peak of the most celebrated streak in soul music. The songwriting is inexhaustible; the arrangements span funk, jazz, gospel, orchestral strings and Brazilian rhythms without ever feeling like scope for its own sake; and Wonder's singing and multi-instrumental command hold a double album together with a coherence that format rarely allows. Reviewers repeatedly reach for the same verdict from opposite angles: a very long record that still sounds too short, sustained at a level its creator never quite touched again.

Its style is a survey of Wonder's full range at once — the exultant pop-funk of its two number-one singles, intimate ballads, a string-laden satire of urban poverty, a percussion showcase, a multilingual anthem of unity — while the vocals move from coos to growls to gospel fervor with the band locked in behind him. The only genuine caveats critics raise are about scale: the four bonus-EP tracks read lighter than the main set, and listeners who don't buy the double-album sprawl will find stretches to skip. Those reservations are clearly the minority position, and even the dissenters concede the craft; the louder recurring note is that nobody sustained this level of ambition and hit-making simultaneously before or since.

Lyrically the record moves between celebration and conscience — love, family, faith, and the joy of making music sit beside a clear-eyed portrait of black America at its Bicentennial, optimistic and realistic at once. Where critics split at all, it's on the album's temperament rather than its quality: some hear a unified, near-flawless statement, others a generous (and occasionally preachy) sprawl whose whole is slightly less than its best moments. The consensus that it is one of the greatest albums in popular music history is essentially unanimous, and its cultural reach has only widened — its influence is routinely cited by later artists, and one of its deepest cuts was repurposed into a decade-defining hip-hop hit two decades later.