Stevie Wonder's 'Fulfillingness' First Finale' at 50

By the time Stevie Wonder released Music of My Mind in 1972, he had already recorded 13 albums. Signed to Motown at age 11 in 1961, Stevie spent the first five years of his career as “Little Stevie Wonder” under the direction of Motown CEO Berry Gordy and songwriter-producer Clarence Paul, many of whose decisions regarding Stevie’s creative direction are laughable in hindsight. It’s hard to square an artist with one of the most undeniable legacies in modern music with the teenaged Stevie of the mid-60s, whose repertoire included Paul’s hokey arrangements of Bob Dylan hits and standards like “Teach Me Tonight” (the latter a decidedly unhinged choice for a 16-year-old to sing).

Despite Little Stevie’s general standing as a beloved child star, there wasn’t much to differentiate him from other novelty acts of the day. It wasn’t really until 1967 (after Motown almost dropped him) that Stevie Wonder the creative force began to take shape, but he wouldn’t be able to break out of his restrictive contract until he was 21.

In 1971, a month before his 21st birthday, Stevie released the album Where I’m Coming From, co-written with Syreeta Wright, his wife at the time, and fully self-produced. From today’s vantage point, it’s a bit unbalanced, and it seems somewhat overwrought—at least compared to the winking clavinet bounce of the Stevie that would soon come to be. But it’s also Stevie Wonder on a glittering precipice, experimenting with synthesizers for the first time, his preternatural gift for melody on full display.

It was Where I’m Coming From, not “My Cherie Amour” or “Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours),” that launched him into the synth-bass haze of Music of My Mind, his first release back with Motown under a new, 120-page contract. Just over six months later came the funk-fueled Talking Book, and then the blazing Innervisions. In 1974, Fulfillingness’ First Finale arrived and, in 1976, Stevie’s storied run concluded with the titanic double-album Songs in the Key of Life.

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It’s difficult to think of another artist whose discography is discussed in the same way as Stevie’s. There are, of course, other musicians with impressive runs of successive albums that not only dominated commercially, but are almost universally agreed upon critically—take OutKast 20 years ago, for example, or Beyoncé, who is on a streak of her own that shows no sign of ending soon. But you’d be hard pressed to name anyone else who did it in a mere four years, especially with a near-death experience smack dab in the middle of it.

On August 6, 1973, three days after the release of Innervisions, Stevie was in a car accident with his cousin while both men were on their way to a show. A logging truck slammed on the brakes in front of them, and allegedly, one of the logs crashed through the windshield and into Stevie’s forehead. Seriously injured, he was in a coma for four days. I say “allegedly” because there doesn’t seem to be a clear consensus about the details of the event, which has been recounted differently by Stevie’s mother, the truck driver, his bandmates in the cars behind him and the numerous media outlets that covered the incident.

The fourth record in the marathon-like run, Fulfillingness’ First Finale, was released on July 22nd, 1974, less than a year after the accident. Much like the accident itself, Stevie Wonder’s classic period is surrounded by a sense of mythos that is surprisingly opaque, given that Stevie is alive and well, and someone could presumably just ask him. But the question I’ve asked myself repeatedly since embarking upon what can only be described as an obsessive spiral of research is: Do we really want clarity anyway?

And there is just something about Fulfillingness’ First Finale that resists clarity. 50 years removed from its original release, it feels like the overlooked sibling in Stevie’s catalog, eclipsed by two of the most monumental pop albums of all time, sandwiched between them and oft-forgotten. It is an undeniably strange record that is difficult to divorce from its context, both within Stevie’s discography and its position in the larger cultural climate of the 1970s.

In 1974, its reception largely makes sense: Despite mixed critical reviews, like the bizarrely backhanded (and kind of racist) review from Rolling Stone’s Ken Emerson, Fulfillingness’ First Finale won Album of the Year at the 1975 Grammys and had two major hits with “Boogie On Reggae Woman” and the Nixon diss track “You Haven’t Done Nothin’.” It was obviously beloved by listeners, who had nearly felt the loss of one of the world’s greatest stars.

But it would likely have felt strange on the heels of Innervisions, an album that rose mirage-like from burning asphalt, dripping with sweat and tension. In contrast, Fulfillingness’ First Finale is like cannonballing into the deep end of a pool and just floating there for the rest of the afternoon. Where Innervisions’ arrangements were tight and meticulously focused, Fulfillingness’ First Finale is relaxed and even loose, exemplified most by the woozy swagger of “Boogie On Reggae Woman” and the mid-tempo bossa nova of “Bird of Beauty.”

While an ungenerous critic could have regarded this as a decline (like Wayne Robins at The Village Voice, who posited that “‘Fulfillingness’ may make a finale to [Wonder’s] latest creative phase”), it’s so much nicer to swim in the calm confidence that’s so evident in the album, from its patient pacing to the smile in Stevie’s voice. Robins’ assertion is also an obvious absurdity to read now, considering, well, everything else (something he graciously admits to having been wrong about in a Substack post from this past March), but it’s also illuminating to consider a world where Songs in the Key of Life didn’t yet exist.

Here is where I reveal the keen sense of anxiety I’ve felt while writing about this record. Thanks to my father, who raised me on Motown, jazz and LA punk, I was an unwitting music snob at a young age. If you’d asked me at age eight what my favorite song was, I would have said “Ebony Eyes”—one of four bonus tracks from Songs in the Key of Life—and I would have rolled my eyes when you, a fellow eight-year-old, hadn’t heard of it.

But in the way that so many childhood experiences are inarticulable, Stevie Wonder’s music is so deeply woven into the fabric of my upbringing that I’ve discovered a near inability to talk about it—as well as some frankly embarrassing gaps in my knowledge of its history. It’s not lost on me that I am a 30-year-old writing an anniversary piece about an album that’s two decades older than me—that I will never know what it was like to see these albums released in real time. As I spent hours with the album that was, for some reason, the final installment of my dad’s curated Stevie Wonder listening experience (long after I could recite the tracklists of Songs in the Key of Life and Talking Book from memory and could sing along to every instrumental solo), I wondered what he had been waiting for.

Unlike Stevie Wonder, my dad was available for comment: “I can clearly remember some people not being happy with this record,” he texted me the other day, after I sent him the Rolling Stone review, astounded at the audacity of Ken Emerson. “This was one of my top headphones albums while doing homework my sophomore year of high school [in 1974],” he said, before clarifying that “some people” meant critics, not anyone he knew personally.

“So why did you wait so long to show me Fulfillingness?” I asked him later on the phone. “I don’t know,” he said. “I must have put it down at some point. I think I forgot how much was there. I’ve been listening to it again recently, and it really is so interesting.” How strange and beautiful to know that, as I sit and fret about my own journalistic authority regarding the 50th anniversary of Fulfillingness’ First Finale, there is someone who was there for it all who still isn’t done discovering Stevie Wonder. But in a way, it makes sense—it was only the first finale.

We’ve Got So Far to Come: Stevie Wonder’s Fulfillingness’ First Finale at 50

Five decades later, some of us are still learning about Stevie Wonder.