0009. Stevie Wonder
Talking Book

Man... a vinyl starting off with You Are The Sunshine Of My Life on the A-side and Superstition on the B-side just can't be bad (and it ain't).

It's a roller coaster journey of love (to paraphrase the Red Hot Chili Peppers) with the happiness in You Are The... turning into suspicion that it's all over in Maybe Your Baby and then into pondering the relationship. Thankfully the album ends on a high note (with songs co-written by the woman which he'd just been through a breakup with: Syreeta Wright).

I'm not sure if it's a theremin that appeares in You And I (We Can Conquer The World), but I'm 99% sure it is [factcheck: yep it is, played by this guy] but it lifts the song to a diferent level. But then I don't know what happened to his voice, cause on Tuesday Heartbreak he doesn't sound just as good as on the rest of the tracks. That, of course, doesn't mean that he sounds bad, just not as magnificent as the standard he'd set up until then.

Superstition can possibly contain one of the funkiest riffs of all time [note to self: get back to this!] and the lyris are pretty top notch also. As it fades out I almost think that the best of the album has passed, but then there's Big Brother...

Big Brother is the civil rights-track on the album but the theme is sadly not outdated and feels as relevant today as it was almost forty years ago. Not to mention that it's a song that settles in your mind.

Talking Book goes on the GotToGets at the first listen - it's both seriously funky business as well as a soulfilled and sometimes socially concious album. And it feels a little bit wrong to have to pick another album to listen to tomorrow.