Talking Book — Stevie Wonder (1972)
A record made to be read by hand as well as heard.
By Rafi Mercer
Most record sleeves are made for the eyes. A photograph, a typeface, a colour that stays with you long after the songs have gone. You look first, then you listen. The order is so ordinary it barely registers.
In October 1972 a sleeve arrived that asked something else of the person holding it. On the front, raised dots spelled out a name and a title. Inside the gatefold, more dots: a message embossed only in Braille, not printed in ink for almost thirty years. "Here is my music. It is all I have to tell you how I feel."
Stevie Wonder was twenty-two. Talking Book was his fifteenth album, and his second that year.
He had grown up inside the Motown machine, and by 1972 he had loosened its grip. More control over his own records. Less of Berry Gordy's hand on the direction. The year before, at Mediasound in New York, he had met two engineers, Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff, and the instrument they had built. They called it TONTO, The Original New Timbral Orchestra, and it was large enough to need housing of its own. Between May and July he moved between Electric Lady in Greenwich Village, Crystal Sound and the Record Plant in Los Angeles, and AIR in London. Every new song, he said, was for the album. By the end there were around thirty. Cecil told him this was supposed to be an album, not a talking book.
The name stayed.
The record opens on a strange choice, if you are listening for it. "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" is one of the most familiar songs ever written, and the first voices on it are not his. Jim Gilstrap takes the opening lines, then Lani Groves. Wonder waits. When he finally comes in, it feels less like an entrance than a man walking into a room where the song has already started without him. Warm, unhurried, entirely sure of itself.
Then the weight drops. "Maybe Your Baby" sits low and heavy: Ray Parker Jr. on guitar, and Wonder on almost everything else, the clavinet, the drums, the Moog bass that moves along the floor of the song. "You and I" strips it back again to a voice, a piano and TONTO. Three songs in, the album has already shown three temperatures. None of them sound like the last record.
What makes it hold is that nothing here was built to stand alone.
"Superstition" came to him on the road. That summer he was opening for the Rolling Stones in front of rock crowds who had not come to see him, and he heard the song whole, in a flash. It was meant for Jeff Beck, part of a deal: Beck would play on the sessions and Wonder would write him a song. Then Gordy heard it. A hit that obvious was not leaving the building. Wonder played the drums himself, and the clavinet riff that has been chased by every funk band since. And he didn't let it end cleanly. It fades straight into "Big Brother", no silence between them, the biggest groove on the record dissolving into its sharpest politics.
There is another story underneath. Some of these songs were written with Syreeta Wright, his wife from 1970. By 1972 the marriage was over. You can hear it without being told. Love songs and leaving songs sit side by side, with no apology for the contradiction. "Tuesday Heartbreak" sounds almost bright. "Blame It on the Sun" does not. The record holds both, at arm's length, and lets you decide which one is true.
Late on side two, the deal with Beck is honoured, just not with the song it was meant for. On "Lookin' for Another Pure Love" his guitar arrives alongside Buzz Feiten's, light and searching. One guest, one solo.
And then the last word.
"I Believe (When I Fall in Love It Will Be Forever)". After the heartbreak, after the politics, after a marriage ending in the gaps between songs, the album closes on belief. Piano. Clavinet. Drums. His own voice stacked over his own voice. It builds the way something builds when one person is making all of it and doesn't want to stop.
Forty-three minutes. Ten songs. One person at the centre of almost every sound.
This is the kind of record that only makes full sense in one sitting. Pulled apart into singles, it gives you two of the best pop songs of the decade. Played whole, side one into side two, in a room where nobody is talking, it gives you something closer to what the title promised: chapters, in order, telling one story. The joins matter. The silences matter. The fade from "Superstition" into "Big Brother" means nothing on a playlist. On a turntable it is the point.
The world listened. "Superstition" went to number one in January 1973. "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" followed it to the top and brought Wonder his first Grammy. At a later ceremony, Innervisions took Album of the Year, and Cecil and Margouleff won Best Engineered Album for their work on Talking Book. It was the opening of a run of records that still has no real equal, ending four years later with Songs in the Key of Life.
But the beginning is the part worth returning to.
Run a finger across an original copy and the dots are still there. Raised. Patient. Saying what they said in 1972 to anyone prepared to read slowly. Most sleeves ask to be looked at. This one asked to be touched, and then it asked to be believed.
When was Talking Book released?
Late October 1972, on Motown's Tamla label. It was Stevie Wonder's fifteenth studio album and his second of that year, following Music of My Mind.
Who made Talking Book with Stevie Wonder?
Wonder produced the album himself, with Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff as associate producers and engineers. Their TONTO synthesiser shapes much of the sound. Guests include Jeff Beck, Ray Parker Jr. and Buzz Feiten on guitar.
Why is there Braille on the Talking Book sleeve?
Original pressings carried Wonder's name and the album title in Braille, with a personal message embossed inside the gatefold. It was the first time Braille had appeared on an album's artwork.
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