Music of My Mind from 'The Wonder of Stevie'

Speaker 1 Hey listeners, this is Wesley Morris.

Speaker 4 I'm a critic at the New York Times and I'm here to tell you about a new podcast I'm hosting.

Speaker 5 I think you'll like it.

Speaker 6 It's called The Wonder of Stevie.

Speaker 5 And even if you think you know about Stevie Wonder, even if you think you know his music, you've never heard it quite like this.

Speaker 14 We're going to take you on a deep dive through Stevie's classic period, five legendary albums back to back in less than five years.

Speaker 19 From the record deal that started it all to the technology Stevie used to create never-before-heard sounds to his influence on our culture.

Speaker 22 I'm speaking with Stevie lovers like Barack and Michelle Obama, Quest Love, Smokey Robinson, Deion Warwick, Babyface, Janelle Monet, and more.

Speaker 19 Join me and revisit all the wonder Stevie's music has to offer.

Speaker 30 Okay, here comes a little taste.

Speaker 1 You can listen to the wonder of Stevie on Audible or wherever you're listening right now.

Speaker 35 Audible Originals higher ground audio in Pineapple Street Studios present the wonder of Stevie hosted by Wesley Morris.

Speaker 13 Listen to that baseline.

Speaker 7 That's an engine pumping.

Speaker 39 We're about to drive somewhere.

Speaker 27 No, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 28 We're about to fly.

Speaker 41 And every day I wanna fly my.

Speaker 42 This is the beginning of love having you around.

Speaker 44 The first song on Music of My Mind, the first album in a run of albums by Stevie Wonder.

Speaker 46 A run almost universally understood to be the most miraculous, most inspired streak in the history of American popular music.

Speaker 7 They call it Stevie's classic period.

Speaker 9 This song is the sound of someone turning into someone else.

Speaker 35 You don't often get to hear what that sounds like, but that's what's happening right here in this song.

Speaker 1 Musical adolescence becoming musical adulthood.

Speaker 17 Axe body spray getting swapped for cologne.

Speaker 36 This song is the moment that little Stevie Wonder, Motown Records boy genius, becomes just Stevie Wonder.

Speaker 19 The visionary who's about to change everything.

Speaker 13 Himself, Motown, our understanding of what pop music can even sound like, and our understanding of who he is and what he's capable of.

Speaker 55 I'm Wesley Morris.

Speaker 15 I'm a critic of the New York Times, and I write about popular culture and the relationship between the present and the past.

Speaker 10 And not infrequently, race is involved in that relationship.

Speaker 48 And I'm just going to say, I love Stevie Wonder.

Speaker 30 I love his love of black people.

Speaker 21 I love his love of all people.

Speaker 30 I love his emotional honesty.

Speaker 21 I love that he's an explorer, curious about life as a person, curious about life as an insect, as a plant.

Speaker 7 And also,

Speaker 45 I love that this run of albums contains a story of both the man who made them and a story about about life in this country.

Speaker 1 For our purposes, this classic period starts with Music of My Mind, which Motown released in 1972, when Stevie was just 21 years old.

Speaker 34 Months later, he was back with the second album in this streak, Talking Book.

Speaker 1 The following year, Stevie releases Inner Visions.

Speaker 21 The year after that, it's Fulfilling This First Finale.

Speaker 5 And finally, the culmination of the run, 1976's Songs in the Key of Life.

Speaker 58 Five albums in less than five years.

Speaker 7 And it's worth looking back at the musical scope and big-heartedness developed in such a short, fraught period of time because it hasn't been matched by any other artist.

Speaker 57 We're talking about Stevie Wonder's music today because it's our history, yes, but also because it's important to our present too.

Speaker 60 There's so much in this music Stevie made over 50 years ago.

Speaker 30 Still, so much that is still moving us, delighting us, surprising, and inspiring us.

Speaker 51 He's left a legacy that still impacts tons of people.

Speaker 62 People we're going to hear from, like Michelle Obama, Babyface, Yolanda Adams, Barack Obama, Jimmy Jam, and

Speaker 64 so many more people.

Speaker 19 To put it simply, for the next six episodes, we're going to be luxuriating in, as Janelle Monet describes it, Stevie being a free-ass motherfucker.

Speaker 37 This is

Speaker 27 The Wonder of Stevie.

Speaker 20 Today, episode one, Music of My Mind.

Speaker 39 Okay, so it's 1986.

Speaker 34 Come back with me.

Speaker 69 It's Thursday night, 8 p.m.

Speaker 3 I'm 10 years old, and I'm watching The Cosby Show.

Speaker 70 I know, just shut up.

Speaker 69 I'm watching The Cosby Show.

Speaker 50 Season Season two, episode 18, and Denise Huxtable has just gotten her license and has begged for a car.

Speaker 34 Now, Denise was the coolest huxtable, but even at 10, I knew cool ass Denise was going to mess this driving thing up and mess it up she did.

Speaker 52 At some point, she and her brother Theo come blowing into the living room with some breaking news.

Speaker 40 You won't believe what happened to us.

Speaker 13 We were in a wreck.

Speaker 71 Only they don't seem like they're in a wreck.

Speaker 48 They seem psyched.

Speaker 72 It's like, Denise, did you hit somebody or did you hit on somebody because i can't tell they're telling this story like the accident is the farthest thing from their minds they hit this other car and then

Speaker 72 and then the back door pops open and gets who steps out

Speaker 72 stevie wonder

Speaker 50 Yada yada yada, the Huxtable family hangs out in the studio with Stevie, who's in these big sunglasses and a milky sweater with four big colorful rectangles up around around his chest?

Speaker 1 He's sitting at a keyboard and he gets them to tell him something for him to record. But they're a little starstruck, even cool-ass Denise, whose immortal line to Stevie is,

Speaker 6 I don't know what to say.

Speaker 23 Denise, it's your turn.

Speaker 64 I don't know what to say.

Speaker 40 I don't know what to say. I don't know what to say.

Speaker 71 And that he turns into music.

Speaker 16 What I couldn't have known at the time is that Stevie was basically in what I'll call

Speaker 74 phase three Stevie.

Speaker 52 Beloved, popular, a member of black people's families.

Speaker 70 Uncle Stevie, basically.

Speaker 3 You know how it is with stars and kids.

Speaker 54 You don't know the history.

Speaker 57 All you know is what you see.

Speaker 75 And all I saw in 1986 was a kind of cultural totem, a stuffed animal nobody could leave the house without.

Speaker 39 I mean, just imagine that you're 10 years old and the first Beyoncé song you ever heard was Cuff It because somebody on TikTok issued a dance challenge.

Speaker 30 Now imagine your aunt telling you then after the song is over, oh, honey, you don't know nothing about that.

Speaker 52 And shows you the Coachella homecoming performance.

Speaker 36 She shows you the formation video and the one for single ladies and you weren't there, you don't know.

Speaker 13 So now your brain's on fire.

Speaker 65 And then she's like, honey, there's more.

Speaker 44 And then she plays you Destiny's Child and you maybe feel like your whole life has been a lie.

Speaker 63 This show, it's about that before.

Speaker 51 About how phase one, Stevie, evolved into Phase 2.

Speaker 3 It's about what came before Denise Huxtable crashed that car into Stevie Wonder.

Speaker 56 These next six episodes are about when Stevie Wonder crashed into us.

Speaker 67 Here's how we're going to do it.

Speaker 14 Each episode in this series is going to delve into one of the albums in Stevie's extraordinary five-album run.

Speaker 71 We're going to start now with Music of My Mind, but before we get to that, how this classic period began, you kind of have to understand how Stevie began as a music prodigy raised in the Motown machine.

Speaker 36 He's born in 1950, Steve Lynn Hardaway Judkins in Saginaw, Michigan.

Speaker 5 In fact, he arrived ahead of schedule, and his being born early resulted in a condition called retinopathy of prematurity. which left him without sight.

Speaker 51 His mother, Lula Mae Hardaway, insisted Stevie not be treated any differently than his four-sighted siblings.

Speaker 44 And so he had a vibrant childhood.

Speaker 25 He was blind, but he and his family would never call his blindness a handicap.

Speaker 69 Lula Mae said as much in a TV interview from 1989 alongside Stevie with the UK's Terry Wogan, because when the Brits love you, they want to know everything.

Speaker 81 You were saying he used to try and ride bicycles as a kid, and did he do all those things, climb trees, all that stuff?

Speaker 82 Yes, clamp trees.

Speaker 81 I mean, how did you get down again?

Speaker 73 I just jumped down and got down.

Speaker 81 Did you know from the start that he he he had great musical talent

Speaker 82 yes i did i did

Speaker 30 stevie was writing his own songs and one day he was out in the family porch playing his bongos and he got on one person's last nerve not because he was loud but because he was blasphemous apparently he was making the devil's music according to a neighborhood deacon familiar with the

Speaker 13 situation This little boy needed to let the Lord in his life, so off to church he went and played the devil's music there.

Speaker 11 And there, at church, as where a young man named Ronnie White saw Stevie and was floored.

Speaker 1 And Ronnie happened to sing with this act called Symbolism Alert, The Miracles, as in Smokey Robinson and the Miracles.

Speaker 42 Ronnie was so impressed that he arranged for Lula Mae to bring Stevie into this new record company called Motown and to meet the young cat who founded it, Barry Gordy.

Speaker 47 Stevie and Lula May arrive at the Motown offices on 2648 West Grand Boulevard.

Speaker 43 And 2648 was a house, just like a modest turn-of-the-century home that in the late 1950s and 1960s would have been impressive for a black family to own.

Speaker 47 But for the label that's about to redefine American popular music, you kind of can't believe this is it.

Speaker 72 Even after they hang a huge sign outside that says Hittsville, USA.

Speaker 15 That's also Motown, major American recording juggernaut,

Speaker 67 and kind of your uncle's house.

Speaker 47 When Stevie and Lula May get there, they're put in this rehearsal room in the basement that's also known as the snake pit.

Speaker 45 And Stevie just starts playing some of the instruments.

Speaker 19 And there are some other people in the room.

Speaker 71 And as the story goes, at one point, one of them, this Motown exec named Mickey Stevenson, He runs upstairs to Barry Gordy's office and says, you gotta come hear this kid now.

Speaker 52 Barry heads down, enters the pit, and notices the crowd that's formed around Stevie, including the Supremes, who are the current babies of the label.

Speaker 65 And he sees Stevie behind the drums, and I could see he was blind.

Speaker 84 He was just moving his head, and he was playing and going and doing everything.

Speaker 84 And it was great, you know. But I was wondering, what's the big deal? Because I wasn't in the market for drummer.

Speaker 36 That's Barry Gordy, apparently unmoved by the sight of a pint-sized blind boy, just killing it on the drums.

Speaker 20 He remembers watching Stevie go from one instrument to the next, and after a minute, that nonchalance, it kind of started to thaw.

Speaker 84 Then he left the drums and he started playing the bongos. And

Speaker 84 he did that, and it was okay, it was nice. And then he, of course, sung.

Speaker 84 You know, I wasn't thrilled with his voice particularly.

Speaker 84 But it was okay. He was good.
And then he went to the harmonica. Now that impressed me.

Speaker 36 With that, and pretty much on the spot, I should say, Motown signed Stevie to a rolling four-year recording contract and a three-year artist management deal.

Speaker 1 They worked out an agreement with the Michigan Department of Libra so that Stevie would be allowed to work.

Speaker 36 Stevie was a minor, obviously, so his mom, Lula May, represented him.

Speaker 47 There was this two-part TV special from the late 1980s called Superstars and Their Moms. Carol Burnett hosted it with her daughter, Carrie Hamilton.

Speaker 85 I used to love Carrie Hamilton.

Speaker 21 And everybody else is in it too.

Speaker 36 Debbie Allen and Felicia Rashad with their mom, Cher and her mom, and Whitney Houston with her mother, Sissy, and then Stevie and LulaMay.

Speaker 41 You know what? I feel shy seeing my mother straight out.

Speaker 49 She's ridiculous.

Speaker 73 What's wrong with her?

Speaker 82 Do you feel bad collecting rock to self and Stevie?

Speaker 87 It is such a deeply 1980s artifact. At some point, Stevie and LulaMae May are at the piano together, and he's doing this lyrical ballad that he dedicates to her.

Speaker 2 You know, just how much he loves her.

Speaker 1 And just as he's ending it, he kind of can't help but just turn the funk up.

Speaker 17 Then she starts to tell this story of Stevie getting his first big paycheck, and Stevie's still at the piano playing underneath her while she talks.

Speaker 82 He was first beginning going on to Motown. I know he don't remember this.

Speaker 88 It was there

Speaker 82 playing drums for the temptation.

Speaker 73 Come in.

Speaker 82 It was kind of cold. He had on this little coat, you know.
He comes stepping in there.

Speaker 82 He gives me a check for $750.

Speaker 82 So here, mama is $750.

Speaker 82 And you know what? That $750 means just as much to me as $700 million.

Speaker 49 And it always will.

Speaker 73 You don't remember that, do you?

Speaker 41 No, actually, I remember that money, and I want that check back.

Speaker 49 Oh, you want the check?

Speaker 50 Motown seized control of all of Stevie's finances and put his earnings into a trust that he would not have access to until he turned 21.

Speaker 18 Motown also gave Lula May and Stevie a stipend that she used to keep the family going, and Stevie's portion started at $2.50 a week.

Speaker 30 The innovation of Barry Gordy's Motown, one of them anyway, is that it's a black-run music company with a stable of black artists in an industry white men control.

Speaker 64 Still, he took out an $800 loan from his family to get it up and running, and his first acts included Smokey's Miracles, of course, Mabel John and Mary Wells and the Marvelettes.

Speaker 5 Then come Martha and the Vandelas and the Supremes and the Four Tops and Marvin Gaye.

Speaker 84 And my dream was that an artist could walk in to one door just a normal kid off the street and come out another door a star.

Speaker 45 So the machinery once they got in there so there were producers there were writers by the time stevie comes onto the scene in 1961 the company is already making enormous hits like the miracles shop around and please mr postman by the marvellettes and everybody at motown is young but stevie wonder is a child at work all daggone day.

Speaker 71 So while the Supremes are Supreming and Mary Wells is a well-in and the temptations are out tempting and the four tops are a toppin', all becoming international sensations, Stevie's there too, soaking all this in, learning how to write and produce and perform.

Speaker 33 And when he's not working and learning at Motown, Stevie's enrolled at the Michigan School for the Blind.

Speaker 74 He's got a tutor that Motown provided named Ted Hull, who is partially sighted.

Speaker 44 And Stevie's also busy being a regular kid.

Speaker 44 Sometimes he'd just swoop into a recording session and interrupt because he couldn't see the red light saying don't go in.

Speaker 34 Recording in progress.

Speaker 12 He'd ride bikes and pretend to be reading books, call up Barry Gordy's assistant and convincingly pretend to be Barry on the phone.

Speaker 9 Deion Warwick, yes, the Deion Warwick, told me about this prank this TV played on her.

Speaker 64 It involved the Sherelles, the Hall of Fame all-girl group famous for dedicated to the one I love and will you still love me tomorrow among other gems.

Speaker 50 For some reason, the Sherelles did not like this red dress Dion had.

Speaker 13 And so they get Stevie to talk to her about it.

Speaker 90 He said, can I say something to you and you won't get upset? I said, of course.

Speaker 90 He said, you know that red dress you wear?

Speaker 90 And it kind of befuddled me. First of all, how did you know it was red?

Speaker 91 I said, yes.

Speaker 90 He said, Don't wear that anymore. It doesn't look good on you.

Speaker 91 I said, what?

Speaker 90 How do you know it doesn't look good? He says, I know, I know.

Speaker 91 I thought he could see it.

Speaker 90 I really did.

Speaker 92 I thought, well, this kid can see.

Speaker 21 Between pranks, Devi was also getting tutoring at Motown that Ted Hall didn't provide.

Speaker 56 The label had a whole finishing school.

Speaker 21 Artist development is what they called it.

Speaker 13 When an act got signed to Motown and had a hit and seemed destined to tour as part of the Motown Review, or maybe even as part of their own show, going to artist development was mandatory.

Speaker 30 That's where you'd basically be made presentable in long sessions of comportment and movement and properness.

Speaker 89 It was like going to school.

Speaker 80 Yes, it's Smokey.

Speaker 53 Smokey Robinson.

Speaker 89 It was mandatory.

Speaker 21 It wasn't your option.

Speaker 89 You had two days a week when you were in Detroit that you want to artist development, no matter who you became or who you were at the beginning, okay?

Speaker 64 Motown was going to sand off those rough edges.

Speaker 30 Allow me to introduce you to Suzanne DePass, who worked at Motown as Barry Gordy's creative assistant.

Speaker 38 She helped launch the Jackson 5.

Speaker 1 Also, she's the one that Vanessa Williams played in the Jackson's in American Dream, that miniseries that plays every Thanksgiving.

Speaker 47 She also really knew the Motown formula to success.

Speaker 93 What was unique about artist development at Motown was that there was a great deal of time and effort put into not only singing and dancing, but sort of an approach to how to do an interview, how to present themselves.

Speaker 13 Basically, even after a few coats of of artist development, you still got to be yourself, but in a sleek, tailored suit with a gleam.

Speaker 78 When you winked or smiled or got out of a car or off a tour bus, you'd be all...

Speaker 64 I suppose a question one could ask is,

Speaker 58 why?

Speaker 44 Another might be, for whom?

Speaker 61 These are fair questions.

Speaker 39 Of course, the implication of that question is that Motown was grooming these performers so white people wouldn't mind looking at them.

Speaker 30 Also fair, but there was a politics at work in this grooming.

Speaker 38 Motown arrived during the TV age, and its acts were basically performing in people's homes.

Speaker 14 Most white people wouldn't have seen black people dressed like this, either on the street because they'd fought to be and accepted being segregated from them, or on TV because the very few black people there were service people in service uniforms or rags.

Speaker 47 So the application of etiquette was as much a revolutionary act of politics as a lunch counter sit-in as far as I'm concerned.

Speaker 54 Maybe even more subtly effective, since seeing four dapper black men called the temptations might actually tempt a skeptical white person to think of them as human.

Speaker 55 At the same time, Motown's respectability approach would have certainly thrilled, delighted, and moved black people.

Speaker 21 Black people who yearned to see other black people as glamorous as the white stars Hollywood was inventing.

Speaker 30 I talked to the Smokey Robinson about this dilemma.

Speaker 89 Back in those days, man, if you weren't being played on white radio, you were in trouble. You know what I mean?

Speaker 38 Was there ever a conversation among you artists and with Barry and some of the other people at the label in the executive branch about this question of being proper and being respectable and making yourselves palatable to a whiter audience?

Speaker 69 Was that ever a conversation?

Speaker 89 You say to a whiter or whiter?

Speaker 17 To a white audience, basically

Speaker 89 it was hard to get played on white radio if you were black back in those days you know what i mean

Speaker 89 but we got to the point where white rotary was calling us asking us could they please have the records okay

Speaker 89 we had to we bombarded them with so many hits back to back to back to back they had no choice they would call us and say can we get the new supreme's record first can we have that new stevie can you give to That was white radio calling us.

Speaker 89 You know what I mean? So, yeah, you wanted to groom yourself because that's where the money was man

Speaker 89 that's where the money was that's where it still is you know i'm saying

Speaker 73 yeah so that's nothing new right about now ladies and gentlemen would like to continue with our show by introducing to you a young man that's only 12 years old and he is considered as being a genius of our time ladies and gentlemen let you and i make him feel happy with a nice ovation as we meet and greet little stevie wonderful how about

Speaker 13 anybody who saw little stevie live would have seen him on stage in his blazer and slacks looking as sophisticated as the label's grown-ups, playing in a touring act called the Motown Review.

Speaker 1 These shows had a kind of big band arrangement, and everybody basically wore versions of the same formal get-up.

Speaker 12 I want to talk about this one night in 1962 at the Regal Theater in Chicago because it's magical.

Speaker 62 The MC brings Stevie on, and he's led out to a chair, a little aggressively for my taste, and he puts a set of bongos in his hands to play a song called Fingertips.

Speaker 88 Ladies and gentlemen, now I'm gonna do a song tipping from my album, The Jazz Soul of Little Stevie.

Speaker 88 The name of the song is called

Speaker 88 Fingertips.

Speaker 34 He's ready to turn them on and turn this song out.

Speaker 9 He starts by telling them to clap their hands and stomp their feet.

Speaker 58 Stomp your feet,

Speaker 88 jump up and down, do anything that you wanna do.

Speaker 88 Yeah,

Speaker 88 yeah!

Speaker 74 I should say first that Clarence Paul and Henry Cosby, two of Motown's great songwriters, wrote fingertips for Stevie's debut album, which was called The Jazz Soul of Little Stevie.

Speaker 70 And I just want to also say that his jazz soul was all of 12.

Speaker 15 It was an instrumental album that's pretty party jazz and it's supposed to show off his percussion and keyboard and harmonica skills.

Speaker 71 You could be forgiven for hearing it and assuming you've been placed on a brief hold.

Speaker 72 But live at the Regal, Stevie meets the audience and this chemical reaction starts.

Speaker 4 The crowd is ready to lose it.

Speaker 83 Eventually he stands up and switches to the harmonica and does some dazzling, pretty sophisticated harmonica playing.

Speaker 70 Again, he's 12.

Speaker 72 Anybody looking at this moment today with any knowledge of who Stevie would become would say, ha ha ha,

Speaker 20 this seems kind of important.

Speaker 30 This is the beginning of Stevie finding an extension of his physical voice with the harmonica, a pocket-sized organ that the mouth plays and that Stevie uses to express the bluest of blues and the highest of highs.

Speaker 72 The harmonica was a way to manifest the music of his mind with his literal fingertips.

Speaker 22 Anyway, at about the performance's halfway point, Stevie pivots into what becomes the song's much more famous second part.

Speaker 45 Everybody say yeah!

Speaker 44 And they do!

Speaker 44 Everybody say yeah!

Speaker 44 Say yeah!

Speaker 44 Yeah!

Speaker 44 Yeah!

Speaker 62 He had actually wanted his stage name to be his birth name, Steve Lynn Judkins. But the folks at Motown were so awed by Stevie's talent that the only stage name that made sense was Stevie Wonder.

Speaker 40 So that's what everybody called him, Little Stevie Wonder.

Speaker 38 It took years for Motown to figure out what to do with all of Stevie's wonder.

Speaker 56 Initially, Barry tried stuffing him into a Ray Charles mold.

Speaker 10 The result was an unimaginative rip-off called tribute to Uncle Ray.

Speaker 47 Other than being blind and astonishingly talented, Stevie's nothing like Ray Charles.

Speaker 24 The live version of the song, Fingertips Part 2, did top the album chart in 1963, but nothing Motown tried for Stevie after made much of an impression.

Speaker 24 And it wasn't like he wasn't trying to break through.

Speaker 30 But as hard as he appeared to work, bringing some soul and wit to songs that didn't really know what to do with either, he seemed poised to become a novelty act.

Speaker 34 By the time he was 15, everybody knew he could sing and play.

Speaker 13 But Motown only let him do that on songs other people had written, and not even songs by its pop masters.

Speaker 30 It wasn't until he hooked up with the songwriter Sylvia Moy, another Motown powerhouse, that anybody knew what would happen if he got to sing and play music he played a part in writing.

Speaker 38 Songs that originated with him.

Speaker 21 At the end of 1965, the label got its answer when it released the song Moy wrote with Stevie.

Speaker 44 Up tight, everything's alright.

Speaker 34 Great song.

Speaker 50 And it sounds like the 1960s and like Motown.

Speaker 21 And at last like Stevie.

Speaker 21 Up tight, I'll just say.

Speaker 74 His voice had actually begun to change to both deepen and grow more elastic.

Speaker 43 And the song went to number three on the Hot 100.

Speaker 15 For years, Barry Gordy had had the wonder.

Speaker 1 But it wasn't until he was helping helping write his own stuff that the wonder really went wow.

Speaker 50 He finally seemed to make complete artistic sense at Motown, a company that in 1965 was still changing the way black people were seen and the way they saw themselves.

Speaker 24 Ever since the first Africans were shipped here enslaved in the 17th century, one question for white Americans, whether they owned black people or believed in their freedom, was what would freedom mean?

Speaker 7 What would it look like?

Speaker 33 How would it sound?

Speaker 27 One answer, I would argue, was Motown.

Speaker 9 Barry Gordy started the label hoping in part to nationalize black music.

Speaker 47 Black culture had been elemental in the development of American pop music, either through black-faced minstrelsy, which white performers invented, or through black forms of expression like spirituals, like ragtime, like jazz and the blues.

Speaker 47 The genius of Motown, at least according to me, is that it took the music you would have been hearing on Sunday morning or Sunday afternoon, because you know how church is, sometimes it starts at nine and ends at three.

Speaker 78 It took black church music, the belted harmonies, all those big feelings, the call and response, and combined it with the music you would have been hearing the night before.

Speaker 56 Music you would have been going to church, praying to God that you could get out of your system.

Speaker 22 Take Martha and the Vandelas in their jam heat wave.

Speaker 24 You can hear an actual palm slapping a tambourine on that song.

Speaker 94 That's exactly what you'd be hearing if you were in church on Sunday.

Speaker 79 And you can hear in the way the Vandelas are calling back to Martha Reeves something else that happens in church, which is basically the congregation calling out to the preacher when the preacher's doing a sermon.

Speaker 13 The music that came out of this shotgun wedding between the sacred and the secular, between gospel music and Western orchestral sounds, strings, woodwinds, that didn't sound like anything else in the radio.

Speaker 36 The clean beauty of Doo-Wop, plus the boisterous noise of a packed club.

Speaker 38 Let's just take Ant That Peculiar by Marvin Gaye.

Speaker 51 That tambourine again.

Speaker 50 Those hand claps, the tightness of the rhythm section.

Speaker 69 Plus, Marvin's angelic delivery of romantic bewilderment.

Speaker 62 He doesn't know what hit him.

Speaker 51 These are gospel ideas that sound like dance music.

Speaker 8 Secular yearning.

Speaker 40 Fun.

Speaker 49 But how can love both the blame?

Speaker 24 By 1965, when this song sold more than a million copies and hit number eight on the pop chart, the Motown sound was basically at the center of American culture.

Speaker 7 And therefore,

Speaker 7 also in America's living rooms.

Speaker 96 There's a kind of music, for instance, the black music which originates from the church, a gospel church.

Speaker 47 This is Devi talking on Rage Music Program, an Australian music show.

Speaker 96 Just like the English music, for instance, at the Beatles, doing a lot of writing. Eleanor Rigby, for instance, or yesterday, I think maybe a little while back.

Speaker 96 Could have been some of the music that originated from the church in a different way. So we've all been influenced, in a sense, by the church music.

Speaker 7 And this is really important for two reasons.

Speaker 45 The church's influence in the Motown can't be understated, and therefore its influence in Stevie's music can't be understated because Americans would have been grooving to, grooving with the best-dressed, best-choreographed people in pop.

Speaker 48 Negroes as opposed to N-words.

Speaker 45 I'll just say it again.

Speaker 54 No white person would ever have seen such resplendent black people before.

Speaker 5 Nor would any black person, really.

Speaker 45 Not Not on TV.

Speaker 45 Motown was fueled by vision and talent and risk.

Speaker 5 Lots of people had become rich, famous, and adored.

Speaker 34 But over time, that system began to demoralize some of the artists.

Speaker 11 And before he was even 20 years old, Stevie was one of those people.

Speaker 37 So at an age when a lot of young adults are heading to college or figuring out their lives, Stevie is churning out hit after hit, like for once in my life when he's 18 years old.

Speaker 11 For once in my life, I have someone who needs me

Speaker 27 and my Sharia Moore, also when he's 18.

Speaker 38 And signs he'll deliver when he's 20.

Speaker 38 Then, that time I went and said goodbye.

Speaker 30 But even with all this success, he had begun to sense that his growth wasn't necessarily in alignment with Motown's.

Speaker 13 And one of his guides to that realization was a Motown secretary named Sarita Wright.

Speaker 73 How did you meet your husband, Stevie Wonder?

Speaker 97 Stevie Wonder heard a record that I had

Speaker 97 done with Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson. And what that record was called, I can't give back the love I feel for you.
He heard my voice and said, hmm, no, I think I need to meet her.

Speaker 86 This is her in 1990 on Geraldo Rivera's Sane talk show.

Speaker 10 And she's talking about their meeting toward the end of the 1960s.

Speaker 79 Stevie's in his late teens and Sarita's doing her secretary work, but she's also singing back up on records by acts like Martha and the Vandelas.

Speaker 71 A lot of the women Stevie would work with, Sarita, Minnie Ripperton, Denise Williams, they have these sweet, almost angelic sopranos, a perfect compliment to to Stevie's singing.

Speaker 9 You can hear the way Sarita's voice flutters on a song like her version of Smokey Robinson's What Love Is Joined Together from 1972.

Speaker 52 Not long after they meet, Stevie encourages Sarita to write her own songs, including with him.

Speaker 97 And so he set up a meeting and I went in and with him, he wrote a song, went in and tried to sing it.

Speaker 97 And I don't know, I've never been starstruck, but I could not seem to get this song called Wind of Love. And I tried.
I was so embarrassed. I was supposed to be a quick study for songs.

Speaker 97 I couldn't get it. And I felt terrible.
But I think he must have done something, you know? He did something so that he could come back and we could meet again.

Speaker 97 That's what happened.

Speaker 69 This is Sarita's way of saying yada, yada, yada.

Speaker 39 We fell in love.

Speaker 38 I wrote songs with him.

Speaker 42 He wrote and produced for me.

Speaker 50 And we wrote some songs together.

Speaker 34 Some gems.

Speaker 12 They marry in 1917, divorce about two years later, and eventually meet and marry other people, start separate families, yet creatively remain very close.

Speaker 76 Something deep and intangible is going on in that yada yada.

Speaker 38 Savrita Wright is a crucial factor in the transition from little Stevie to Stevie.

Speaker 71 She was his personal artist development program.

Speaker 37 So...

Speaker 34 That brings us to 1971, the year Stevie turns 21, a time lots of people graduate from college and start to figure out the rest of their lives.

Speaker 1 1971, also the year his contract, the one we mentioned at the beginning of the episode, is set to expire.

Speaker 80 And it's going to be a thing.

Speaker 67 Barry Gordy wants Stevie to re-up that contract, so he tries to sweeten the deal a little bit by planning Stevie a big 21st birthday party.

Speaker 84 We were in Detroit

Speaker 84 on his 21st birthday and we had a little party for Stevie and we we sat at the table, and we were having so much fun.

Speaker 62 So, that contract Stevie's mom signed a decade ago when he was 11 and then renewed at 16?

Speaker 72 A 2% royalty on his record sales and Motown handles his finances and his earnings go into a trust that he can access when he's 21?

Speaker 15 We're talking about an estimated $3.5 million.

Speaker 43 Guess who's got a birthday coming?

Speaker 22 And guess who's surprised to discover that the money Motown's given him is nowhere near what he believes he's owed.

Speaker 62 Imagine Stevie shocked at hearing about the enormous deductions Barry's been charging to Stevie's account for his tutor Ted Hall who Motown fired when Stevie graduated from high school.

Speaker 62 For Stevie's allowance, whatever that means, when you subtract all of that, not only did Stevie not get $3.5 million, he got about 3.4 million less than that.

Speaker 47 Anyway, back to the birthday party Barry's throwing for Stevie.

Speaker 7 Yay.

Speaker 84 When I got here, there was a wire from Stevie's attorney disaffirming every contract that he had with Motown.

Speaker 31 I couldn't believe it.

Speaker 1 My favorite move when a businessman is caught with his hand in the cookie jar is when he's like, I don't really understand what's happening here.

Speaker 56 They're just cookies.

Speaker 14 Sorry, Barry.

Speaker 44 This business, baby.

Speaker 84 I'm sitting with this man, and I thought, surely, Stevie's leaving the company. He disaffirmed everything.
He's 21. Now he's going to go out and get beards from all the other companies.

Speaker 84 And he's got to be, he's going to leave the company. I mean, that's why else would he do this without telling me anything?

Speaker 80 For all those years, Barry had complete financial and creative control over his artists.

Speaker 7 Now, one of them was pushing back hard, and he's got nothing to lose. Here's Barry in a place he's rarely ever been before.

Speaker 5 Life or death compromise.

Speaker 10 He's got to give something up.

Speaker 5 or he's going to lose Stevie.

Speaker 47 You might be hearing me say this and wonder, what were the financial consequences?

Speaker 42 What about his mother, Lula May, who originally signed this deal?

Speaker 44 Did Stevie really ever consider leaving Motown in any serious way?

Speaker 22 And most importantly, after being this misled by Barry, why would he stay?

Speaker 47 You know, these are all the existential questions that are probably unknowable to anybody who isn't named Stevie Wonder.

Speaker 36 And who knows, maybe one day I'll get to ask him.

Speaker 22 But what I will say is that in Gerald Posner's book on Motown, a man named Thomas Beans Bowles, who managed the kids' accounts, is quoted as saying, the problem was that Barry kept those accounts going for too long.

Speaker 30 He didn't know when to stop treating people like kids.

Speaker 58 So, put a pin in that.

Speaker 34 In the meantime, though, Stevie's new contract ran to more than 120 pages.

Speaker 51 120 pages of Stevie mapping out his independence from a man who had been his boss and a father figure to him for so many years.

Speaker 84 And it just turned out that Stevie was 21 and he wanted to show me that he was 21 now

Speaker 84 and he wanted a little respect and

Speaker 84 he ended up making me pay him $13 million

Speaker 84 to sign up another whole new contract with him, which was unprecedented at the time, but probably one of the best deals I ever made.

Speaker 1 You can say that now, Barry Gordy, hindsight being what it is.

Speaker 36 and besides the 13 million, Stevie wanted his own publishing company that would own the publishing rights instead of Motown.

Speaker 79 20% royalties, total artistic control of all his songs.

Speaker 30 He wanted to choose who played on these records.

Speaker 8 He wanted to choose what songs appeared on the album and what the first single would be.

Speaker 35 Basically, he wanted absolute autonomy from Motown's classic way of doing things.

Speaker 16 Stevie was at least as big as the music factory that discovered him.

Speaker 79 Signed, sealed, delivered, free.

Speaker 84 A lot of people talk about the whole thing of me reaching 21 and everything happened and everything broke and everything this and I began to rebel and

Speaker 1 here's Stevie talking about that on Annie's series biography.

Speaker 84 It didn't start at 21. It started really

Speaker 84 and it starts anytime that I get

Speaker 84 bored with what I'm doing. So I'd done a lot of writing, a lot of songs, and I just felt

Speaker 84 that

Speaker 84 as much as I knew that Motown felt they were doing whatever they thought was best for my career, I had a feeling as to how and what I wanted to do.

Speaker 10 And what does 21-year-old Stevie Wonder do with that newly acquired freedom?

Speaker 62 He does this.

Speaker 62 Please!

Speaker 33 Love having you around.

Speaker 13 It's the song we started this episode with.

Speaker 86 The first song on Music of My Mind, the first album in this streak that this whole show is about.

Speaker 38 Stevie would never be the same after this album.

Speaker 47 He would never sound the same.

Speaker 24 The album isn't just the sound of an emotional breakthrough or some sort of philosophical breakthrough. This is the sound of a technological breakthrough.

Speaker 8 Stevie had discovered a sound, a technology that produced a sound that he could hear in his head, but that no Motown factory, no house band, no matter how good it is, no regular instrument was going to produce.

Speaker 8 It's a sound he went looking for.

Speaker 38 And when he found it, it was as revolutionary for him as when he picked up a harmonica for the first time or when he got that new contract from Motown.

Speaker 34 Something that would take his sound into the future.

Speaker 24 That is a song called Cybernaut from an album called Zero Time.

Speaker 25 Cybernaut sounds like a Stevie Wonder record with a flat butt.

Speaker 15 It was written by a couple of self-described experimental stoner hippie music geeks named Bob Margoleff and Malcolm Cecil.

Speaker 24 When Stevie heard their album Zero Time, it blew his mind. Bob and Malcolm were part of an act called Tanto's Expanding Headband.

Speaker 15 The Tanto referred not to the Lone Rager's Native American sidekick, thank God,

Speaker 1 but to a synthesizer.

Speaker 11 A souped up, complicated behemoth of a synthesizer that was able to create really weird, very specific sounds.

Speaker 13 So he hears this otherworldly sound and he goes goes to New York City to Bob and Malcolm's studio.

Speaker 3 He's never met them.

Speaker 1 They don't know he's coming and then,

Speaker 7 well, I'll just let Bob tell it.

Speaker 91 It was

Speaker 98 Memorial Day weekend in 1971. The studio was closed.

Speaker 98 Malcolm was chief engineer of Media Sound, so they gave him an apartment over Delicatessen, which was approximately very next door to the studio, one flight up, so he could look out the front window and see the studio entrance below.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 91 it was very quiet because it was a holiday.

Speaker 98 There was very little traffic and it was kind of warm. It was late in the afternoon.

Speaker 98 And I hear, Malcolm, Malcolm, and Malcolm and I stick our heads out the window and look down at the entrance to Media Sound. And there is Ronnie Blanco, a fellow bass player.

Speaker 98 standing there with a tall black guy in a chartreuse drum suit with our album under his arm. And that was Stevie.

Speaker 64 They invite him in, and there's a room full of instruments and speakers.

Speaker 9 And before long, Bob and Malcolm and Stevie start noodling around playing music together.

Speaker 70 And over in the corner of the room is this big-ass synthesizer.

Speaker 14 Except it doesn't even look like the diet piano thing you're probably used to seeing, especially when Stevie performs live.

Speaker 13 This thing is a console of keyboards and knobs and jacks and wires whose purpose is to synthesize sound, not simulate analog instruments.

Speaker 7 In this case, the synthesizer in the corner of that room is a six-foot-tall circular machine, a wall, an edifice that could extend to 25 feet in diameter and weighed one ton and probably get you to Oz.

Speaker 1 Obviously, that thing is calling Stevie's name.

Speaker 91 Stevie put his hands all over it. There was plenty of wires sticking out of the front of it.
I put up a sound on the synthesizer. We had it plugged into the studio, into the speakers.

Speaker 91 And he says, Bob, Bob, there's got to be something wrong with it. And I said, why? He says, well, I play in all these notes and just, I skips from one note to the next.
I don't know what's going on.

Speaker 91 And we had to explain to him that the synthesizer, in a way, was sort of like a saxophone. He only played one note at a time.

Speaker 9 And so begins an artistic relationship with Tanto, with Bob and Malcolm, with Stevie.

Speaker 20 that would last for the next four years.

Speaker 1 As a force, and they helped Stevie get at sounds he'd never been able to communicate before.

Speaker 1 After that first meeting, they made one song, then another, until a few songs became 17, and 17 became the makings of a library.

Speaker 17 Stevie finally found the tools and collaborators that could take his power, which was awesome, and make it a superpower.

Speaker 91 Steve said, oh, you know, this is...

Speaker 91 I got a lot of stuff on my mind. And we said, yeah, it's a good album title, Steve.
So that's how Music of My Mind came out.

Speaker 83 Music of My Mind is an album full of swinging moods.

Speaker 13 One thing about Stevie is that he knows his way around a love song and love and loss are all over this record.

Speaker 47 He and Sarita were mid-divorce when he recorded these songs.

Speaker 1 And and the album culminates with the realization that you can love, love,

Speaker 19 love the person who used to be your better half.

Speaker 49 And all the things she wants to be, she needs to leave behind.

Speaker 80 The second song on this album, it's a seamless marriage of two songs put together to make one shocker called Superwoman, Where Were You When I Needed You?

Speaker 20 This marriage of two songs is extra poignant when you think about each side being about separation.

Speaker 71 Even a, I don't know, a middle schooler can hear the disappointment in that.

Speaker 92 I remember I was like

Speaker 92 ninth grade and totally in love with this girl and she was leaving that summer.

Speaker 67 This is babyface.

Speaker 60 And look, we talked to a bunch of people just to hear what Stevie's music means to them.

Speaker 30 This guy has 12 Grammys.

Speaker 12 He's one of pop music's great production minds.

Speaker 56 He's a peerless writer of earworms.

Speaker 29 But even with all that acclaim, all that success, all those Grammys, all that talent.

Speaker 18 Back in 1972, Babyface was just a kid named Kenny Edmonds with a broken heart.

Speaker 38 Because the girl he liked didn't like him back and Stevie Wonder was the place he drowned that sorrow.

Speaker 92 It was like the end of the year came and she was going away and I remember going home and skipping past Superwoman and playing, where were you when I needed you?

Speaker 92 Because the way that he used those scents that almost sound like strings and it felt like it was talking directly to me and directly to my emotions and the state that I was in and I just kept playing that song again and again and every time I hear that song to this day it takes me right back to like summer of 1973 and and that lonely feeling that I had of this girl that was going away for the summer and I also knew that she was going away to see this guy that she liked that wasn't me.

Speaker 1 As necessary as this album is for setting Stevie up to innovate on the albums that follow, and for as much as some of us, like me, love this album, it didn't make much of a splash in 1972.

Speaker 17 Not in the charts, not on the radio.

Speaker 42 The album's biggest single, Superwoman, Where Were You When I Needed You?

Speaker 54 It didn't even crack the RB top 10.

Speaker 74 Is that because the music wasn't as immediately accessible as some of Stevie's earlier hits?

Speaker 44 Was it because art that's revolutionary always takes a while to catch on?

Speaker 44 Is it because music critics at the time were pretty much all white guys and they couldn't fully appreciate what Stevie was up to thematically?

Speaker 43 I'll keep my answer brief.

Speaker 91 Yes.

Speaker 33 All I can say is, with Music in My Mind, they sensed something good stylistically was changing with Stevie.

Speaker 36 They even liked the album, more or less.

Speaker 1 What they were sensing had to do with the nature of the sound of this music.

Speaker 39 In Rolling Stone, Vinceletti called it indulgent and egotistical, but he also noticed something important.

Speaker 70 Wonders is one of the very few down-to-earth uses of the synthesizer, he wrote.

Speaker 37 No attempts at space music here, No swollen, overwrite breaks engulfing two-thirds of the album.

Speaker 14 Only funky, exuberant music of the sort we've come to expect from Stevie Wonder.

Speaker 1 That sound Vinceletti was picking up on was Tanto.

Speaker 9 And the way that Stevie and Malcolm and Bob used tanto wasn't normal.

Speaker 39 It wasn't routine.

Speaker 70 It's not how producers tended to use synthesizers in music.

Speaker 31 It's like normally for a song to be emotional, it was violins, it was strings, it was cellos.

Speaker 1 This is the producer and songwriter Jimmy Jam, who along with Terry Lewis has made some of the greatest pop songs of anybody ever.

Speaker 30 That includes the masterpieces he made with Janet Jackson.

Speaker 31 It was French horns, it was obos, it was all the traditional. If you think about the Motown system, all of those things existed.

Speaker 31 And what made those songs so beautiful was those string arrangements and that. Stevie took all of that away, and now he's doing what a horn would do on a synthesizer.
And that was so revolutionary.

Speaker 31 Up to that point, synthesizers were kind of a lot of blips and almost sound effect type things.

Speaker 31 The fact that he was using the synthesizer as like the main instrument for chords and beautiful textures and actually finding the emotion in the synthesizer where it wasn't this cold electronic thing.

Speaker 31 All of a sudden, there was a nuance to it and a

Speaker 31 warmness to it. And, you know, that really made you feel emotional about an electronic sound.

Speaker 18 The revolution of Music of My Mind is also the revelation of this album.

Speaker 8 It's that Stevie had found warmth in all of that machinery.

Speaker 30 He found a deep human frequency in it.

Speaker 9 The ground he broke is that electronic music was no longer just for robots and sci-fi, for geeks and freaks in outer space.

Speaker 61 It could make real sense right here on Earth.

Speaker 17 He could use it for joy and pain, and he knew instantly, instinctively, how to adjust the temperature on those emotions with this device to get Tanto from robotic to romantic.

Speaker 15 Like he does on the next song, track three, I love every little thing about you.

Speaker 39 He immediately chases the uncharacteristic bitterness in Superwoman, Where Were You When I Needed You, with with what sounds to me like an atonement.

Speaker 22 One that starts with this chiming opening and then it swells to this blissed out melody.

Speaker 22 I love, I love, I love, I love every little thing about you, baby.

Speaker 14 I love every little thing about you as one of my favorite Stevie Wonder choruses ever.

Speaker 77 It's pretty simple, just that title repeating over and over.

Speaker 52 But it's got a gospel song's bigness and certainty.

Speaker 13 He loves, he loves, he loves.

Speaker 29 The way congregants love Jesus, he loves this woman.

Speaker 54 And then it ends very softly with Sarita whispering about candy and sugar, and Stevie growling about a big old piece of cake.

Speaker 29 There's ecstasy on Music of My Mind.

Speaker 46 There's such sympathy and rich poetry.

Speaker 63 There's also this

Speaker 89 playfulness.

Speaker 1 Take the second to last song on the album, Keep On Running, which starts with the opening rattle of church where the preachers revving the house band up, that throbbing Moog bass line, a tease of what sounds like a wawa guitar, some snake-rattling tambourine as Stevie tells somebody, something's about to jump out of the bushes and grab you.

Speaker 30 And this one-man jam session takes off, rising and building, and then tumbling apart before thunking up all over again.

Speaker 40 Some gon' jump out of the bushes and grab,

Speaker 40 and some gon' grab you.

Speaker 7 You need to stay and grab me.

Speaker 9 The idea of this song always makes me laugh.

Speaker 45 It's church music in a mini skirt with a drink in one hand.

Speaker 77 That's a classic Motown idea.

Speaker 34 But with Stevie rejecting Motown's efficiency and rigor, this song, like the rest of Music of My Mind, is about playing with form, about being rigorous in some new way that chiefly involves a determination to define independence as almost literally doing everything yourself, including taking everything you've learned from your colleagues and mentors to invent some new thing that doesn't want to get boxed in or be concise or musically simple.

Speaker 34 It wants to sound exploratory because the man making it is on an adventure to discover himself.

Speaker 80 I love every little thing about this album.

Speaker 45 I I loved it before I knew anything about how it got made and how important it was to Stevie's becoming his own artist.

Speaker 1 I love the assurance and craftsmanship of this album. I love the daring of Stevie Wonder to abandon the comfort of Motown's innovations and renovate himself.

Speaker 12 I love that Stevie didn't care about these questions of artistic purity when it comes to so-called genre music.

Speaker 1 Black music, jazz, R ⁇ B, soul, gospel, blues, reggae.

Speaker 13 As if these forms didn't come from the same source?

Speaker 80 As if electronic music didn't come from the same source.

Speaker 2 Here's the thing about the synthesizer.

Speaker 5 It was never a dead end for him.

Speaker 52 For Stevie, it was the key to unlock his musical mind and an escape hatch out of everybody else's.

Speaker 20 It was a way to do what Motown did, combine the church, the party, and the symphony.

Speaker 36 Only he didn't need a whole orchestra.

Speaker 46 He was a one-man funk brother.

Speaker 20 What becomes obviously, irreversibly true about Stevie and his ingenuity starting with Music of My Mind, and what'll become even clearer and more electrifying just months later with his next album, is that even though he had this enormous piece of technology he's going to use to bring all these new ideas and feelings together, his vision transcends the technology itself.

Speaker 66 See, as important as Tanto was for making Stevie's dreams come true, it was just an instrument.

Speaker 13 The reason these albums mattered at the time, the reason they still move us as much as they do, it's pretty simple.

Speaker 56 The real synthesizer, it was Stevie.

Speaker 34 This album declares his independence.

Speaker 6 The next album in the streak, Talking Book, makes him bigger than he'd ever been.

Speaker 99 He basically provides the goods and has the makings of what could be a global superstar.

Speaker 99 And this is one of the ways that Stevie Wonder will start not only living up to the promise of creative genius, but also in terms of a creative genius that can be commercially viable, this will help in that direction because he's going to face an entirely different audience that otherwise just knew of asked that guy that sang that one song or the other song or whatnot.

Speaker 12 That's next time on The Wonder of Stevie.

Speaker 45 This has been a higher ground than audible original.

Speaker 19 The wonder of Stevie is produced by Pineapple Street Studios.

Speaker 35 Higher ground audio and audible.

Speaker 12 Our senior producer is Josh Gwynn.

Speaker 1 Producer is Janelle Anderson.

Speaker 19 Associate Producer is Mary Alexa Kavanaugh.

Speaker 1 Senior Managing Producer is Asha Saluzha.

Speaker 12 Executive Editor is Joel Lovell.

Speaker 19 Archival producer is Justine Dahm.

Speaker 62 Fact checker is Jane Drinkard.

Speaker 12 Head of sound and engineering is Raj Makija.

Speaker 19 Senior audio engineers are Davey Sumner, Pedro Alvira, and Marina Paiz. Assistant audio engineers are Jade Brooks and Sharon Bardales.
Mixed and mastered by Davey Sumner and Raj Makija.

Speaker 12 Additional engineering by Jason Richards, Scott Gilman, Javier Martinez, and Leon Doe. Score and sound design by Josh Gwynn and Raj Makija.

Speaker 60 Original score performed by Carless Music and Raj Makija.

Speaker 1 Additional music provided by Epidemic Sound.

Speaker 10 Hosted and executive produced by Wesley Morris.

Speaker 55 Higher ground executive producers are Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Corinne Gilliard Fisher, Dan Fearman, and Mukta Mohan.

Speaker 19 Creative executive for higher ground is Janae Maribel.

Speaker 38 Executive producers for Pineapple Street Studios are Jenna Weiss Burman and Max Linsky.

Speaker 19 Audible executive producers are Kate Navin and Nick D'Angelo. The Wonder of Stevie is also executive produced by Amir Questlove Thompson, Anna Holmes, and Stevie Wonder.

Speaker 19 Questlove is a producer of this show courtesy of iHeart and can also be heard on Questlove Supreme from iHeart podcasts.

Speaker 76 Special thanks to John Asante, Brittany Payne Benjamin, Leela Day, Sam Dulnick, Haley Ewing, Kevin Garlitz, Amos Jackson, Rob Light, Alexis Moore, Joe Paulson, Nina Shaw, Chris Sampson, Eric Spiegelman, and Zara Zolman.

Speaker 14 Recorded at Different Fur, Patches, The Hobby Shop, and Pineapple Street Studios.

Speaker 10 Head of Creative Development at Audible is Kate Navin.

Speaker 77 Chief Content Officer is Rachel Giazza.

Speaker 19 Copyright 2024 by Higher Ground Audio LLC.

Speaker 12 Sound Recording Copyright 2024 by Higher Ground Audio LLC.