Sounds You Don’t Remember: After 50 Years, Stevie Wonder Finally Pries the Vault Open

“I betcha you can’t even see the sun.”

This line opens Stevie Wonder’s just-released “I Can See the Sun in Late December,” but it could easily apply to that recording itself - or the supposed hundreds of songs that form perhaps the most tightly-sealed vault in popular music.

While his contemporaries (and their estates) are now happy to churn out career-retrospective box sets and expanded album reissues with dozens of outtakes, sometimes to the point of superfluity, Stevie has largely kept his catalogue of unreleased recordings away from the curious ears of the public.

You know it’s great stuff, too. A Motown star from the age of 13, Stevie negotiated a landmark deal with the label in 1971 that granted the 21-year-old full creative control. He used that to create an astonishing run of full-length masterpieces in quick succession: Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, Fulfillingness’ First Finale, Songs in the Key of Life. These albums weaved Stevie’s increasingly ambitious songwriting together with the new tones of the latest synthesizers (until Songs, that instrument was the room-sized TONTO) to form a rich tapestry of forward-thinking sound that traversed soul, funk, pop, jazz, rock, folk and classical. Equal parts introspective and righteous, futuristic and familiar, they remain the benchmark of popular music.

When it comes to that vault, then, fantasies abound. Engineer John Fischbach estimates around 200 songs were recorded during the sessions for Songs in the Key of Life, left in various stages of completion. There are said to be dozens more outtakes from the sessions for the rest of his “classic period”; indeed, Songs only came about after he’d recorded and scrapped a Fulfillingness’ First Finale 2. Actual contemporary recordings have proven elusive, however, with Stevie preferring to either finish songs years later (eg. “All I Do”, “Overjoyed”) or shelve them entirely. For many years, the only officially released tracks from these golden years were 1974’s “Feeding Off the Love of the Land”, used in Spike Lee’s 1991 film Jungle Fever, and, if it counts, a demo vocal for a song he wrote for Minnie Riperton. That legendary door stayed firmly shut.

Until now.

Four unreleased tracks recorded during sessions for Songs in the Key of Life were released two weeks ago to mark the album’s 50th anniversary. The imaginatively-titled Songs in the Key of Life: The EP crept onto streaming platforms unannounced at 4:54am, the exact minute its marathon recording sessions finally concluded.

Despite fierce competition, Songs will go down as Stevie’s magnum opus. Recorded over two years with a supporting cast of 130 people, including George Benson, Herbie Hancock, and Riperton, Songs is a wide-ranging suite that justifies its title with reflections on love, religion, childhood, parenthood, racial discrimination, music itself, and all in between. It remains a timeless, life-affirming work; to hate this album is to fundamentally reject goodness, and not many do. The colossal double-album-and-EP set garnered immediate acclaim, becoming the third album to debut atop the Billboard 200, winning the Grammy for Album of the Year, and establishing a permanent spot on any worthwhile ‘greatest of all time’ list. 

It would be a tremendous, week-making surprise to wake up to ‘new’ songs recorded for any album of its rarefied stature. To have them from Stevie’s is like discovering you’ve inherited a priceless family heirloom. Are you sure? Are you sure you’re sure? Thank you.

To those songs, then. “It’s Easier” is an effervescent, playful tune that belies its tale of a lovesick Stevie consulting a “love physician” that tells him a hard truth: the instant pain of a break up is ultimately less hurtful than a lifetime of ever-present misery. This song has a million-dollar chorus - it’s eeeeeeea-ssiiiierrrr! To say looooooooove, bye-bye! Than to GOOO aaa-rounndddd with a heart that wants to cry! - that could’ve definitely made it a single in its time. The contrast between a big, jovial hook and gloomy subject matter is a trick he also pulls off on Fulfillingness’ “It Ain’t No Use”, though I think this song both leans a bit sillier and plays its melody straighter. To quote James Brown’s prophetic studio chatter, this is a hit!

“My Life Story of Love” sets a relaxed, languid tone with its warm Rhodes keys and wandering synth lines. The soundscape reminds me of the gargantuan TONTO synthesizer that graced his four prior albums, and the track’s mellow, woozy feel evokes his concurrent 1974 productions on Fulfillingness’ First Finale and Minnie Riperton’s Perfect Angel. Meanwhile, the lyrics, with its nature-based metaphor about “letting her bloom into my flower of love”, anticipate his polarising, experimental 1979 soundtrack for Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants. The sentiment is wearied - he’s never had a romantic dream come true - but ultimately hopeful. This is the only ‘new’ track to feature a co-writer: Susaye Greene, the late-period Supreme who also helped him pen Michael Jackson’s nocturnal reverie “I Can’t Help It” during this album’s sessions. Perhaps the least immediate of the four, but that’s no insult; a pleasant morning of gardening is its own kind of thrill.

Long-suffering Wonder-heads must still be celebrating the release of “I Can See the Sun in Late December”. Originally considered for his 1973 album Innervisions, he instead gave it to Roberta Flack, who expanded it into 12 minutes of enchanting and wintry melodrama on her 1975 album Feel Like Makin’ Love. One-eyed (eared?) Stevie fans had only a 1974 television performance and another at Roberta’s funeral last year to approximate his original demo. His four-and-a-half-minute version is smaller in scale than Roberta’s epic, but it builds its own kind of mournful intensity that could’ve easily sat alongside “Living for the City” and “He’s Misstra Know-It-All”. And what a devastating lyric. Stevie reunites with someone he once knew, but can hardly recognise the person that greets him, lost to the world and lost to themselves: 

I see forgotten treasures 'neath the sea

Tides that defeat identity

Washing away the beauty that was in your mind

I can hear the sounds you don't remember

The sounds of birds and trees in harmony

Chords being blown by a gentle breeze

Making the perfect melody you left behind

Who is he talking to? An old friend, a foe, himself? I suppose that’s your question to answer. Its power is its restraint - that one-sided pain of mourning the person still standing in front of you. To me, it’s one of his most profound musings.

Our last track is the peppy “I’m Into Livin’”, which kicks off with a few hits of a computerised snare drum and a squelching synth bass line, filthy enough to retire your welcome mat. When some zappy synth chords and saxophone riffs join in, it forms a sparse, off-kilter pocket that grabs your attention. Stevie’s lively vocal, conveying the fresh delight of a newly-retired playboy, forms an unusual call-and-response with his own keyboard in the chorus: “I’m into livin’! (blurp-blurp!) For your love! (blurp-bluurp-blurp!)”. Of these songs, this one most anticipates the complete synthetic sheen of his post-Musiquarium ‘80s recordings - even when backing vocalists fill in on later choruses, they have an icy, robotic tone. I’m a fan of the cool, unexpected chord changes near the end of the chorus, which are uniquely Stevie. Musical trainspotters will also note the line he seemingly ad-libs on the top of one of those modulations: “L.O.V.E., loooooooooove!”, which he would recycle for the album’s gorgeous opener, “Love’s in Need of Love Today”. A sneakily catchy slice of funk.

So, should these tracks have made the cut fifty years ago? As great as they are - and we have expounded upon this at length - I’d say not. These recordings sound about 90% done to me, all missing that final layer of polish heard on Songs. The most obvious giveaway is the rigid Sly Stone drum machine that powers half of these tracks; seldom heard on Stevie’s albums at the time, they often sound like placeholders for a proper drum track (and indeed, Stevie ends “It’s Easier” by asking the engineer to “put the drums on that”). It’s no coincidence that the most ‘finished’ sounding track to me, “I Can See the Sun in Late December”, is without one. I found this to be a bit of a surprise, given the legend and rumoured scale of his vault. But Stevie knows what is there when it comes to the state of those 200 outtakes; the rest of us have these four.

The other question this begs is: why now? Stevie’s historical reluctance to share archival recordings suggests a person too future-focused to linger in the past, and also the idea of that action being too final. Releasing your art to the world forever changes your relationship with it: these pieces are no longer just your intimate creations, but become the world’s to cherish and scrutinise however they wish. If you’re doing that, I suppose you want them to be perfect, and maybe that explains his lifelong habit of tweaking and finishing compositions years, if not decades, after first writing them. It’s natural to wonder if this EP suggests a change of heart, but I think Stevie’s indirect announcement of it at a July concert is telling in this regard. There, he said his long-awaited album Through the Eyes of Wonder would release next year, packaged with four tracks from the Songs sessions. I’d like to think this suggests Stevie’s found a middle point of being comfortable with his old recordings and his new songs co-existing in the open. It can be “and”, not “or”.

Many of us dream that Stevie finally twisting open the vault door marks a turning point, that it all but confirms the Songs in the Key of Life (Super Deluxe Edition). That's to be seen, but if we could hear these, who’s to say we won’t eventually be able to listen to Fulfillingness 2, his demo for “I Can’t Help It”, or any number of gems we simply know nothing about? It’s hard to argue that the best 21 tracks made it to Songs in the Key of Life, but these four are too good to have been hidden away for so long. 

It was around fifty years ago that Stevie lamented, “I can hear the sounds you don’t remember.” At last, so can we.