Stevie Wonder - Innervisions [180g, Gatefold, Back To Black] (LP) Vinyl

Innervisions is the sixteenth studio album by Stevie Wonder, released on 3 August 1973 by Tamla, a subsidiary of Motown Records. It sits at the centre of the "classic period" that began with Music of My Mind and Talking Book, and it is the record generally credited with completing his transition from the "Little Stevie Wonder" of romantic ballads into a mature, socially conscious artist.

The Album

Wonder wrote, arranged and produced the record himself, and played all or virtually all of the instruments on most of its nine tracks. He continued to work with the T.O.N.T.O. (The Original New Timbral Orchestra) synthesizer system built by Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff, who served as associate producers and handled the programming of the ARP and Moog synthesizers as well as the engineering of the electronic music. Cecil and Margouleff had been pushing Wonder to widen his lyrical range beyond romance towards political and metaphysical subjects. Sessions were held at Record Plant in Los Angeles and Media Sound in New York, and George Marino mastered the record at The Cutting Room in New York.

The nine tracks cover a wide span of themes: drug abuse on "Too High", inequality and systemic racism on "Living For The City", love on the ballads "Golden Lady" and "All In Love Is Fair". The closer, "He's Misstra Know-It-All", is widely read as an attack on the then US President Richard Nixon. "Living For The City" was one of the first soul records to address systemic racism explicitly and to work everyday street sounds, traffic, voices and sirens, into a studio recording. The sleeve illustration is by Efram Wolff.

Innervisions entered the Billboard albums chart on 18 August 1973 and peaked at number four, while reaching number one on the Billboard Soul LPs chart. In the UK it became Wonder's first top ten album, peaking at number eight. Three hit singles were drawn from it: "Higher Ground", "Living For The City" and "Don't You Worry 'Bout A Thing", with "He's Misstra Know-It-All" issued as a fourth single in the UK in July 1974. At the 16th Grammy Awards the album won Album of the Year and Best Engineered Non-Classical Recording, and "Living For The City" won Best R&B Song.

Three days after release, on 6 August 1973, Wonder was badly injured in a car crash near Durham, North Carolina and spent ten days in a coma. His tour director Ira Tucker later described singing "Higher Ground" into his ear in hospital and watching his fingers begin to move in time with the song.

This Pressing

This is the Tamla Motown Back To Black reissue, remastered and pressed on 180 gram heavyweight vinyl as a single LP in a gatefold sleeve. The gatefold interior carries the full album lyrics on one panel and Efram Wolff's artwork on the other. A voucher is included for an MP3 download of the album. Catalogue number 0050109032617, barcode 050109032617.

Tracklist

Side 1

1. Too High (4:37)
2. Visions (5:17)
3. Living For The City (7:26)
4. Golden Lady (5:00)

Side 2

1. Higher Ground (3:54)
2. Jesus Children Of America (4:04)
3. All In Love Is Fair (3:45)
4. Don't You Worry 'Bout A Thing (4:55)
5. He's Misstra Know-It-All (6:06)