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It was a little after 9 p.m. Thursday night at Madison Square Garden, and Stevie Wonder was finally getting loose. He’d begun “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” one of his defining anthems, with a hopped-up-hootenanny version of the country standard “You Are My Sunshine.” He almost giggled — it was light work.
Then, with fullness and verve, he jerked hard into his song, and the music went from 2-D to 3-D. He wasn’t denigrating the other one, so much as he had a point to make.
“I. Feel. Like. This. Is. The. Beginning.”
Each word arrived like a rocket whizzing past your ear — propulsive, powerful, so potent you almost tilted your head away ever so slightly to let it zip by. He was singing a love song, a declaration of emotional commitment, but when he really got going, it felt much more like a convocation. This love, we’re all in it together.
So it went during this performance — part of a brief tour with the extremely chewy title, Sing Your Song! As We Fix Our Nation’s Broken Heart — which was much of the time a display of unparalleled singing, some of the time a kaffeeklatsch of feel-good utopianism, and in more places than you’d think a showcase for a very serious artist to be very silly.
First, the voice: Wonder can do things with it that no popular singer in the five decades since his commercial prime has truly been able to match. It can sound like it’s falling apart while it’s in fact landing with strength and precision. With Wonder, a song is a suggestion, a framework to set up pyrotechnic runs and novel alternate melodic approaches. The song (usually) has a fixed starting and concluding point — everything else is a negotiation.
Much of his set list was drawn from the stretch from the late 1960s through the mid 1970s during which he released perhaps a dozen or two of the most indelible entries in the history of American song. His hits were somehow better now, imbued with decades of memory. “Higher Ground” — full of swinging yelps. “My Cherie Amour” — tender, but with a nasty fifth gear. On “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours,” he made the hook punchy — less exuberant plea and more marching declaration. On “Superstition,” his keyboard sounded unusually chunky, all fat slaps and tense reverberation. (And don’t forget his harmonica, which can be perspective-shifting, as on “Isn’t She Lovely.”)
Behind and beside Wonder was a support staff of over two dozen — backup singers, a brass section, multiple percussionists, a thicket of strings players. On the one hand, this was a spectacle: a big band to fill a big room. But often, they made a mighty noise somehow without making a splash. And sometimes, like on “Master Blaster (Jammin’),” it was all a bit distracting, a compensation for something that needed no accompaniment.
On a couple of occasions, Wonder rescued a down moment with an absolute detonation — following a jumbled “Send One Your Love” with a peppy “Do I Do”; or delivering the secular praise song “Living for the City” right after he’d brought the room distressingly low with the dour “Village Ghetto Land.”
In a few places, he seemed to remember fewer words to the songs than the audience did — both his own, and a cover of Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are.” And in a set that ran over two hours, there was no “Ribbon in the Sky,” no “Part-Time Lover,” no “I Was Made to Love Her.”
But these are preposterous complaints, quibbles over being able to stuff your front pockets with fistfuls of gold, but not your back pockets, too. Wonder is 74 and a global treasure of impassioned, technically dazzling, generally kick-ass singing. Should you have the opportunity to see him perform live, do so immediately. Age and time haven’t significantly decayed his gift, as they have with so many performers of his generation. If anything, he’s friskier now.
That extends to how he carries himself, which is with a slight air of mischief, the mien of a man who knows just how much latitude he has, and takes just a bit more. He hammily interspersed his songs with shopworn stories delivered with such glee you could almost overlook that he’s likely told them hundreds of times.
He relied on familiar, and maybe outmoded, pleas for common decency and social unity and ambition: “I believe in the impossible. I believe in the truth”; “You’re not scared of the future, are you?” He opened his set with a new song, “Can We Fix Our Nation’s Broken Heart,” which bordered on pablum, and which he led into with a splash of topicality: “Show me a picture,” he said, of “people eating dogs.”
Wonder was channeling some sentiment that feels far from the center of contemporary American political and cultural life, which is as divided as ever, riven by bad faith. Even if the brightness of the optimism was harsh, he meant well.
His most effective solutions, though, weren’t headline-checking lyrics or mid-set affirmations. His real instrument was escape. A core curriculum of exuberance and tactile joy. It may have been anachronistic, but it still softened the re-entry into tomorrow’s harshness.
Sing Your Song! As We Fix Our Nation’s Broken Heart continues Saturday in Philadelphia, and runs through Nov. 2 in Chicago; steviewonder.net.
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