We Can't Sing a Song with No Melody

Stevie Wonder has always been one of my favorite artist with Superstition hovering in my top five songs for a while. You can always here me listening to his songs from his early upbeat Motown era to his introspective funky seventies period. But like most people, I found most of his post seventies music to be less than memorable aside from his duet with Babyface on How Come, How Long. His new album A Time to Love, is better than most of his eighties record but he still doesn’t capture the greatness of his earlier work.

The closest Stevie gets to the seventies era is the album opener, If Your Love Cannot Be Moved. The song has a grandiose feel to it highlighted by gospel singer Kim Burrell trading lines with Stevie and a rhythm section straight out of Africa and a choir just adds to the song. But after the first song, Stevie reverts back to his eighties sappy love song stage with a string of run of the mill R&B songs such as Sweetest Somebody I Know and Blue Moon. The low point of the whole album is the extremely cheesy Passionate Raindrops.

But after that is the funky Tell Your Heart I Love You which puts the album back on track. There is also Please Don’t Hurt My Baby that also harkens back to his seventies period and also incorporates what sounds like a Roadrunner sample. Stevie ends A Time to Love with a string of songs that also come close to his earlier work starting with What the Fuss. The song features Prince on the guitar and En Vogue handling the backing vocals. In the song Stevie takes on anyone who doesn’t take responsible for themselves from the government to parents to addicts. Can’t Imagine Love without You is the only love song here that isn’t overly sappy.

The album ends much like it began with tribal beats, socially conscience lyrics, and guest vocals, this time by India Arie on the title track. Paul McCartney shows up over twenty years after Ebony and Ivory to add acoustic and electric guitars on the song. With the album coming in at well over an hour, Stevie could have shaved some of the weaker tracks, but as is, this album is still better than anything he has done in twenty-five years.

Song to Download – A Time to Love

A Time to Love gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.