A smile spread across Stevie Wonder’s face as he jived his way into the second verse of ’Joy Inside My Tear’.
The melody was there, but the words were gone, so Wonder freestyled and sang with disarming charm:
»I forgot the words, please forgive me...«.
Even a musical master can make mistakes. And that kind of lapse has a way of making geniuses seem more human.
On Sunday night, however, Stevie Wonder was just a little too human in a sold-out Royal Arena, where he performed his great masterpiece, ’Songs in the Key of Life’, to mark the double album’s 50th anniversary.
That small memory slip was telling in an evening full of miscues and a lack of spark.
From repeated technical problems to a lack of commitment — and with it the absent spark — in what should have been a triumphal procession.
Of course, a lot had to come together over the course of those three-plus hours.
The 21 songs were unfurled in all their shifting moods and styles by the enormous band surrounding the 76-year-old Stevie Wonder.
The original work featured more than 100 musicians. On Sunday, I counted more than 30 onstage. There were backing vocalists, a string ensemble with a conductor, horns, a sizable rhythm section and musicians coming and going along the way.
The ambition was certainly there.
But they followed Wonder’s every whim and desire with equal parts skill and obedience, never imposing themselves too much. And perhaps that was precisely the problem: it all felt a little too bloodless.
There wasn’t enough of the inner tension you might otherwise get between a gum-chewing African-American drummer in a chunky gold chain and a petite older white woman with a prim fringe and a cello.
The possibilities were there. They just never made anything of them.
Less like Sunday morning in Harlem
At one point, Stevie Wonder spoke about his mother:
»She always told me to express my feelings«.
And that is certainly what Wonder did in the 1970s.
After demanding artistic freedom from Motown, Wonder released a string of Grammy-winning masterpieces from 1972 to 1976.
At the height of his extraordinary dominance of American music, Wonder skipped 1975, prompting Paul Simon to thank him in his Grammy acceptance speech for not releasing anything. That way, others had a chance too.
This is where Stevie Wonder’s influence is beyond dispute. There is no Prince, Michael Jackson, George Michael or Kanye West without him.
It culminated — and in many ways ended — with his 18th album, ’Songs in the Key of Life’, a 26-year-old man’s almost overambitious attempt to contain all of life’s horror and beauty in one wild formulation of r’n’b, pop, jazz and Latin music.
As Wonder sang in Royal Arena on ’Sir Duke’, his tribute to the great Black jazz icon:
»Music is a world within itself/ with a language we all understand«.
When Wonder sang that, the audience rose from their seats. As if they had suddenly remembered that Stevie Wonder is also something you can dance to.
Other songs, like ’I Wish’ and ’As’, had the same effect. Songs that, like the rest of the evening’s preordained repertoire, were hard to throw completely off course.
Elsewhere, there was a palpable distance between preacher and congregation.
Stevie Wonder repeatedly tried to turn Royal Arena’s white middle-class audience into a gospel congregation, but the atmosphere felt less like Sunday morning in Harlem than coffee morning at an overexcited clapping club.
Rewrite the story
Stevie Wonder wrote and recorded his magnum opus in a turbulent decade marked by poverty, an energy crisis and political apathy in the wake of Watergate.
A song like ’Village Ghetto Land’ recalled something we know all too well from America in 2026:
»Children play with rusted cars/ Sores cover their hands/ Politicians laugh and drink-drunk to all demands«.
Likewise, Wonder’s correction of American historical storytelling on ’Black Man’, written to mark the nation’s bicentennial, is no less relevant today, as the Trump administration sets about purging the history books.
In that way, Stevie Wonder still had something to say to the present.
That was true even when the older Wonder sang the young Stevie Wonder’s hopeful songs about love, spirituality and joy, as on the sugary-sweet ‘Knocks Me Off My Feet’, his voice now carrying all the hard-won experience of the years in between.
So yes, there were moments. But on the whole, Stevie Wonder was too restrained.
He made only the most tentative changes to the phrasing of his own story, never really daring to grapple with the inheritance. It lacked both precision and passion. And 50 years on, those things still matter.
The masterpiece was placed before us for admiration, its undeniable greatness there for all to see, but not, in the end, to be moved by it.
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