MUSIC REVIEWS
Stevie Wonder - A Time To Love
David Allun Jones
Stevie Wonder’s managed to become a more well-rounded human being than about 95% of the Earth’s population…and he’s had to deal with blindness since infancy! An extremely talented child prodigy who has become one of the most inspirational and influential icons in pop music, Wonder should also be commended for helping to make Martin Luther King’s birthday a national holiday, being apart of the all-star USA for Africa charity and writing socially conscious lyrics that educated our minds to the injustices of the world. Despite those accolades, though, Stevie’s relevancy descended very steeply after his amazing 70’s heyday. The following decades found him releasing sappy MOR material and less-than-funky funk jams that paled in comparison to his classics. So it’s with much skepticism that one should listen to his latest album, and first in about ten years, A Time To Love.
Does Stevie’s candy-coated Hallmark Card odes of affection still hold weight in today’s tough hip hop-dominated musical landscape? Well, nothing here is going to get him in heavy rotation on BET (unlike Charlie Wilson or Ronald Isley, Stevie didn’t enlist R. Kelly’s aid to get the children’s ears), but it doesn’t matter because A Time To Love exists on some totally different plane where current trends are ignored, superstar guests are relegated to small background roles (including Bonnie Raitt and Paul McCartney offering instrumental support) and the music manages to sound as fitting today as it would’ve thirty years ago. It’s a testament to Wonder’s relentless optimism being so effective that he would be able to come up with material that coincides with nothing else in the contemporary market and would be deemed silly and trite coming from most other artists.
Built around the concept of love conquering all, the fifteen track A Time To Love hits an emotional nerve with sparkling balladry that’ll have anybody that’s single instantly yearning for someone to cuddle with. The tracks are so uplifting in their perfect romance idealism and crisp timelessness, delivered with Stevie’s flawlessly solid tenor, that the idea of settling down and being in love doesn’t seem hokey at all. Songs like “Moon Blue” and his touching doe-eyed duet with daughter Aisha, “How Will I Know”, crackle with pre-rock elegance while his lyrics are written with such a sophisticated and classy sense of poetics that all the stuff you hear on the radio will sound as simple as a pre-school kid reciting their ABC’s.
For those in search of something a little more meaty, A Time To Love can get a little grating but the chunky Parliament-esque “So What The Fuss?”, featuring background vocals from the original En Vogue and some incredible guitar work by Prince, carries a masculine form that proves Wonder hasn’t lost his ability to funk while the India Arie-co-penned African rhythm-riddled title track and edgy “If Your Love Cannot Be Moved” balance the lushness with a sense of grit by displaying shameful realities we all share that would need to be overcome in order to set the world right.
Sticking to what he knows best but returning to the inspired artist we once knew him to be, Stevie Wonder has released an album that though lacking the playfulness that would make it’s sentimentality much more easier to swallow, succeeds in adding another great chapter to his golden music catalogue and reminding us how just how little in stature we are next to him.
