Advertisement
Listen
Now
Buy RS
cover reprints!
Download the cd!
Buy the album at Rhino.com
Making this record, Wonder would often stay in the studio forty-eight hours straight, not eating or sleeping, while everyone around him struggled to keep up. "If my flow is goin', I keep on until I peak," he said. The flow went so well, Wonder released twenty-one songs, packaged as a double album and a bonus EP. The highlights are the joyful "Isn't She Lovely" and "Sir Duke," but Wonder also displays his effortless mastery of funk, jazz, balladry, Afrobeat and even a string-quartet minuet. Nineteen years later, Coolio turned the haunting groove of the quiet "Pastime Paradise" into the Number One single "Gangsta's Paradise."
Total album sales: 1 million
Peak chart position: 1