STEVIE WONDER / “Superwoman (Where Were You When I Needed You)”

I realized recently that we haven’t really explored Stevie Wonder’s music. I can’t speak for Kalamu, but I’ve been hesitant partially because there doesn’t seem to be any reasonable place to get started. In addition to Stevie’s massive and daunting catalog, there are the many covers of his songs, there are all of his outside productions and guest appearances, and, in addition to all of that, Stevie also excelled at writing for others. So since there really isn’t anywhere “right” to start (I’m certainly not going to try to start at the beginning), I’m going to start where I feel like it and make it up from there.

Perhaps because of his blindness, Stevie was acutely aware of and intimately attuned to nature and the changes the seasons bring. He has numerous songs about various aspects of nature: the sun, the outdoors, flowers, the stars and planets, etc. He also frequently talked about summer, winter, fall and spring. (And in that order, I think.) Here are my favorite five Stevie Wonder songs about the seasons. #5. “Never Dreamed You’d Leave In Summer” from Where I’m Coming From (Motown, 1971) [Out of print] Quotable: “You said there would be warm love in spring time.” A fairly obscure record from a fairly obscure album. Stevie’s previous album, 1970’s Signed, Sealed, Delivered was his first official outing as a producer (although I’ve read that might’ve been more of a title than a reflection of what actually happened in the studio), but this 1971 LP was Stevie’s first “mature” release, the first one that looks like, feels like and sounds like it was created by a man instead of a boy. Already though, Stevie’s seasons metaphor is fairly well developed — the narrator seems to assume that “spring” love should be warm and “summer” love hot. From that, I think it’s safe to infer that fall would be cool and winter would be cold. The narrator is therefore left hurt and confused when his lover departs not in fall or winter (as he might have expected) but during the heat of summer. Musically, the orchestration is a bit much and Stevie is over-singing some — I think young Mr. Morris might’ve been trying to prove too much too soon. In the end, despite how much I like it, I know this record doesn’t compare favorably to some of what was soon to come from Stevie. But then, what does? #4. “Knocks Me Off My Feet” from Songs In The Key Of Life (Motown, 1976) “I see us in the park, strolling the summer days of imaginings in my head.” Here’s a song where Stevie completely and unabashedly gives in to the glory of happy love/summertime. Listening to this one, it’s hard not to put yourself in a quiet park or on a secluded trail with just you and your special somebody, sun glowing overhead, love glowing within…you know, all that sappy stuff that sounds so stupid when others talk about it but feels so good when you’re actually experiencing it. It takes a great poet to make those same ol’ three words sound fresh and new. Stevie does it by preceding them with: “I don’t want to bore you with my troubles, but….” Nice. #3. “Summer Soft” from Songs In The Key Of Life (Motown, 1976) Quotable: “Winter wind whispers to you that he wants to be your friend.” Pure gorgeousness. Definitely one of the prettiest sad song I’ve ever heard. This song is also a bit of a departure in that Stevie usually uses the seasons as a metaphorical backdrop for the stages of a relationship with spring and summer being mostly positive while fall and winter indicate hardship or an impending breakup. Here, he humanizes the seasons themselves and, intriguingly, neither summer nor winter is altogether good (or bad). In the first verse, “summer soft wakes you up with a kiss,” which sounds pretty good, except Stevie also notes it’s probably going to rain later. You have to wait, Stevie says, to find out “is it sun or rain for you.” Later, “winter wind whispers to you that he wants to be your friend” and “plans to have a winter ball for you to throw,” but he also “forces dangers way with his breeze.” Snow or clear days? Stevie asks. You just have to wait and see. So that’s winter and summer. A sometimes gentle but largely undependable woman and a charming man who’s full of promises but also capable of turning harsh and cold at a moment’s notice. And then, even more interestingly, Stevie comments on spring and fall. “It’s October,” he sings, “And she’s gone.” And, “You’ve been fooled by April and he’s gone.” So it’s not just that summer or winter are hard to pin down, they also stick around only a couple of months before disappearing. That’s unpleasant. But boy, does he make it sound pretty. #2. “Visions” from Innervisions (Motown, 1973) Qoutable: “I know that leaves are green / They only turn to brown when autumn comes around.” The (almost) title song from Stevie’s most powerful album – 1971’s Innervisions. In every other song from this post, Stevie uses the seasons as metaphors for romantic love. In this post, he uses autumn as a metaphor for the passage of time and the inevitability of conflict and struggle. The song begins with Stevie talking about his “vision” of a heavenly world where “hate’s a dream,” “love forever stands,” and (quoting MLK) “all men feel they are truly free at last.” The melody is one of Stevie’s prettiest and the electric guitar (the album credits say David T. Walker but I confess to not knowing who he is) is sublime. But Stevie wasn’t content to write a mere “milk and honey” song. Instead, he adds, “I’m not one who make believes” and “all things have an ending” and “today’s not yesterday.” In other words, he isn’t interested in idle fantasy. He actually wants to know: “Could a place like this exist?” In a way, it’s less a question than it is a challenge. Thirty-five years later, we’re still working on the answer. #1. “Superwoman (Where Were You When I Needed You)” from Music Of My Mind (Motown, 1972) Quotable: “Where were you when I needed you last winter?” This may be the greatest of all of Stevie’s great love songs. Why? Because, as the full title (somewhat) indicates, it’s actually two songs, not one. And, while either of the two would’ve been damn good on their own, together they’re the type of thing you pull out whenever some half-deaf somebody wants to question Stevie’s official “musical genius” status. Answer me this. Exactly how absurdly talented do you have to be to actually compose both “Superwoman” and “Where Were You When I Needed You”—in other words, a pair of frickin’ hit records—and then actually think to yourself, “You know what I should do? Make these two songs one.” Who thinks like that? Who actually does something like that?! Steveland Hardaway Morris, that’s who. Want further proof that these are actually separate songs? The running time is just over eight minutes, but there’s no soloing, no extended repetition (musically or lyrically), no long intro, no long outro, no extended segue. In other words, no fluff or time wasting. The first four minutes are one song; the second four are another.* Oh, and did I mention that Stevie—at the age of TWENTY TWO—not only wrote the lyrics and music for “both” of these songs but also played all the instruments and did all the vocal work and produced it as well? Crazy, crazy, crazy. A couple of notes about the lyrical themes. Part one is sung to a woman named Mary, who, to Stevie's chagrin, wants not only "to be a superwoman," but also "to be another movie star" and "boss the bull around." The last quote is the most telling as Stevie happens to be a Taurus. In the end, Stevie decides he "just [has] to say goodbye" because even though he "knows [her] very well" and can "cope with all the things going through [her] head," he's unwilling to spend all his time crying, presumably over the complexities of dealing with such a difficult woman. It's fairly easy to imagine that "Mary" is actually Syreeta Wright given that the pair were going through a divorce at the time and given that Syreeta—a former secretary at Motown—was in the process of developing her own music career. (Strangely enough, Stevie himself was very involved in Syreeta's albums even though most of the music was recorded during and after their breakup. He co-wrote many of the songs, sang on some and played on some. I'd even say that some Syreeta songs are basically Stevie Wonder performances with Syreeta standing in on lead vocals.) With "Superwoman" as a backdrop, take a listen to some of the themes and metaphors in the “Where Were You” half of this record. I don't know if we're intended to hear part two as a continuation of part one, but part two finds Stevie in a much more wistful, if not exactly conciliatory, mood. He's stuck on the idea that his woman left him even though he's just told us it was he who did the leaving. Perhaps he sees all of her bossy Hollywood superwoman stuff as some sort of abandonment. Or maybe these really are separate songs written at separate times and, thematically, one has nothing to do with the other. On an entirely different note, check out some of the other metaphors in part two. Stevie says: “parting from love’s nest” and “you went further south” and “through the bitter winds.” It almost sounds like these two are birds. —Mtume ya Salaam * The only hit record I can think of that works in a similar way is Queen’s “We Will Rock You”/“We Are The Champions,” but those two were officially released as separate songs. They’ve been sort of merged together by virtue of radio stations (and Queen live in concert) often playing them back to back.              I got next                  The seasons, huh? Next week, more Stevie classics and who knows which way we’ll go. Don’t really matter. It’ll be Stevie. It’ll be good. No, not good. Great. Next week will be great! And yeah, I've been waiting on this too. In fact, just to give you a taste of how deep we’re going to go, here's a live bootleg of "Visions." Do I need to say ENJOY??!! —Kalamu ya Salaam

This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 12:35 am and is filed under Classic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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