A Story of Stories
Fifty years of Songs in the Key of Life, and what the ear learns before five in the morning
By Rafi Mercer
At six minutes to five one morning, in the last studio session of a record its audience had waited two years for, the bassist Nathan Watts shouted the time. Fo'FiftyFo'. It became a joke among the people in that room, the kind a band carries for decades that means nothing to anyone who wasn't there. This week it came back, attached to four songs from those sessions that nobody outside had heard.
I know that hour. Not his. Mine.
More often than not, five o'clock is when I listen. At the end of September in Yorkshire it's still dark then, and nothing has started asking for anything yet. Sound behaves differently at that hour. It has more room. A bass line isn't competing with the day, because it has the day to itself. I'd always half assumed this was a private habit, one of those things you do without looking at it too closely. It turns out one of the greatest records ever made was finished at the same hour, by people who had simply kept going until the room was all that was left.
I learned the world by ear. I'm dyslexic, and when I was a boy the page gave things up slowly and at a cost, so I listened instead. Most of what I learned young, I learned by hearing it. You get good at holding things: a sentence, a voice, the order in which someone told you something. You carry it, because carrying it is how it stays.
Songs in the Key of Life came to me in my late teens, on vinyl, by mistake. That's all there is to how it arrived, and it's the least interesting thing about it.
What I remember is being overwhelmed. It didn't sound like an album. It sounded like a story of stories, each one opening onto the next before the last had finished, more lives than one record should be able to hold. It was built to be too much. When it came out on 28 September 1976, it was a double album with a seven-inch tucked inside, four more songs under the title A Something's Extra, and a twenty-four-page booklet of lyrics and credits. Motown had waited two years for it. Wonder gave them more than they could reasonably have asked for, and then some.
The stories come at you from every side. "I Wish" is childhood remembered with its hands still dirty, the bass pushing forward like a kid who won't walk when he could run. "Sir Duke" is a roll call of the people who taught him, Ellington and Basie and Ella and Satchmo, carried by a horn section so bright it seems to have its own light source. "Isn't She Lovely" has his baby daughter Aisha in it, crying and laughing in the bath, the most domestic sound on any record of its size. "Village Ghetto Land" sets poverty against a courtly, synthesised string arrangement and lets the contrast make the argument. "Black Man" is a history lesson with a groove underneath it. And "As", with Herbie Hancock on Fender Rhodes, is a promise of love made to outlast everything, and it keeps building as if it intends to get there.
I couldn't have told you then what held it all together. I think now it was the listening.
Much of it was recorded at Crystal Sound in Hollywood. The working title was Let's See Life the Way It Is. Wonder was twenty-six and had been blind since birth. He memorised his lyrics, which let him move quickly in the studio, but some of these songs had four or five long, intricate verses, and nobody holds all of that at once. So John Fischbach, one of the engineers, would read the next line into Wonder's headphones a few seconds before he had to sing it. One voice fed another through the ear, a line at a time, and the second voice took it and gave it back at full weight. Fischbach said years later that it never threw him.
When I read that, something settled. It wasn't a revelation. It was more like recognising a way of working you had assumed was yours alone.
I don't want to push it further than it goes. Blindness is not dyslexia. He was a genius in his twenties, and I was a teenager who had bought the wrong record. But I know the method. The world comes in through the ear, one line ahead of where you are, and you hold it, and you make something of it before the next line arrives. That's how a boy who struggles with the page ends up learning anything at all. It is also, it turns out, how Songs in the Key of Life got made.
Maybe that's why it overwhelmed me. It was a whole world arriving the way the world had always arrived for me.
There's a reason the rooms we care about at Tracks & Tales ask you to sit still for a whole side. Some records can only be understood the way a child who can't read understands everything else: in order, all the way through, by ear. You can't skim this one. There's no page to skim.
This week I've been listening to it again. It is still too much. I've stopped thinking of that as a flaw.
Of the four new songs, the one I keep returning to is "I Can See the Sun in Late December." It's a gentle ballad in which Wonder, who has never seen anything, describes the beauty of the natural world and then turns, quietly, to the people who can see perfectly well and still miss it. It spent fifty years in a vault and arrives just as the year starts to lean towards December. Wonder said this week that there is still more to hear. At an anniversary that could be a line for the press release. From him it sounds more like a description of how he has always worked.
Tomorrow I'll be up before five, as I usually am. It will be dark, and the day won't have started yet. On the far side of that hour, in a studio in 1976, a bassist looks at a clock and shouts the time, a room full of tired people laughs, and none of them yet knows what they've made.
Six minutes to five.
When was Songs in the Key of Life released, and what is on the 50th anniversary EP?
Stevie Wonder released Songs in the Key of Life on 28 September 1976 as a double LP with a bonus seven-inch EP. On 28 September 2026, exactly fifty years later, he released a four-song EP of previously unheard recordings from the original sessions: "It's Easier," "My Life Story of Love," "I Can See the Sun in Late December" and "I'm Into Livin'." The tracks were chosen by Wonder and mixed by the album's original engineers.
What's the best way to listen to Songs in the Key of Life?
Whole, and in order. It runs well over an hour and a half, and the sequencing is part of the story, as childhood, faith, politics, family and love pass the thread between them. Give it a quiet room and an uninterrupted stretch of time. Early morning works better than you might expect. For a live version, Wonder is performing the album in full on a 50th anniversary tour that opens in Birmingham on 13 October, with UK dates in London, Manchester and Glasgow.
What is The Listening Club?
The Listening Club is the Tracks & Tales membership for people who take music seriously. Each month, on the last Sunday, members gather online to hear one album played in full, from wherever they are in the world, with no talking over the record and no skipping.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe.
Every month, The Listening Club gathers around the world. Join here.
