better golden run: Stevie Wonder or Joni Mitchell?

joni's one where i 'respected' it in principle or whatever but in reality i rolled my eyes and would leave the room if it was played for the longest time and then one day something snapped and i went thru an obsessive period (somewhat similar thing happened w/ kate bush - i loved several songs but would rmde at the standard kate fan and then one day i woke up and started to become one of those weirdos also). i'm old enough so that stevie was always this presence for the longest time - i can remember ppl getting very excited by hotter than july in an 'alright, just a speed bump, he's back in the groove' and then throughout the eighties this since that even as he kept releasing stuff, some of it incredibly great ('do i do'), some of it solid ('part time lover'), some of it truly dire (you know of what i speak), that eventually he'd stop fucking around giving tours to the cosby kids in his studio and unleash another holy shit masterpiece when he decided to. in some ways witnessing this prepared me for the last twenty years of prince.

"If It's Magic" into "As" is one of the great sequencing miracles of the album age, Jesus Christ

xp great post b

"making one as love-LEE as SHE

The seventies are full of unexpected Stevie intonations and lyrical constructions.

btw Songs in the Key of Life is my least favorite album of Stevie AND Joni's imperial phase sequences.

and Characters, Conversation Peace and A Time to Love are solid to excellent albums, but a lot of fans don't appreciate him when he's full R&B (as I think he is on these records imo).

do ppl really live to be 205 on Saturn tho

it's 10 zillion light years away

not gonna call a guy with a visual impairment on his sense of distance

lol A+

both once odd roadblocks for me, and it's still sort of that way with stevie. i bought blue on reputation and was sort of unprepared for its spareness and that voice like a beam of sunlight bouncing off a damn crystal which i understand can be a little overwhelming for some and definitely was for me. but i kept listening to it, trying to find in it what other people found, and eventually lived in the songs for so long that the pleasure i eventually discovered felt very individual (i haven't totally worked out my thoughts about this but i think this might be a huge part of her appeal). i'm still sometimes confused by the chord progressions in "the last time i saw richard," they don't work in the way i expect chords to work, it's kind of dizzying. this effect is of course amplified a thousand fold in hejira and hissing of summer lawns which were hugely dense and elusive first listens for me, and honestly hissing still gets away from me. for stuff that is often coded as emotional and confessional it is very minimal, reticent even, giving very little away, pretty content with its own performance and space.

stevie sort of feels similar even though he is very much a Pop Musician. something about the hugeness of songs in the key of life and the twisting structures of some of his songs, which function as pop but complicate as they go. i just listened to fulfillingness' which is a record i love but today i wasn't really feeling it until the second side kicked in. something about the richness, the incredible history you can perceive note-to-note in these records is so overwhelming that it can be initially, sometimes intermittently, alienating? dunno. also my idea of stevie is kind of screwed up—always heard his motown singles on oldies radio but they never actually name songs on those stations, so for a while i just carried stuff like "signed, sealed, delivered" in a disembodied way. later in my life i bought a motown singles box and was blown away to discover that was stevie; the stevie wonder i knew was the narrative i constantly received from vh1: "(small, near-invisible description of early career) but then CREATIVE FREEDOM and these CLASSIC, EXPANSIVE RECORDS"

This is a great thread. And perfect timing for me. After having listened (and very much enjoyed - it's a perfect album, really) only to "Blue" for years, I bought the new box set the other day, and am finally getting ready to dig in for real. "Hejira" is amazing. Got some work left to do on Stevie, too, but love "Songs" and "Innervisions", especially the latter.

Marvin Gaye suffers from a similar problem. Once I got past the hits that everyone knows I was floored by how great the pre-creative freedom catalogue is.

With Stevie it was simpler: I inherited my uncle's copy of Innervisions, put the needle on "Too High," and couldn't believe its liquid groove.

Twenty years after hearing George Michael's the-good-ol-college-try version, I can now say "They Won't Go Where I Go" is chilling. I'm sure Stevie Wonder himself knows what he uncorks in that vocal.

Stevie by a long way. In that run of albums I think there are probably only three songs that I don't like. I Wanna Talk To You, Sweet Little Girl and Isn't She Lovely. Those albums are just full of incredible songs. His run from 70 to 80 has probably only been equalled by prince in the 80's, probably shouldn't start that argument here though.

The Joni run is great but I've gone off Blue in recent years and really the fact her best album, Court & Spark ends with such a terrible song still bugs me quite a bit.

Al Green's run is pretty amazing but his music didn't have the variation that Stevie's did. I'd probably say Curtis Mayfield is the closest person to having a similar kind of run in quality around the same time.

always thought it was a bizarre cover for George Michael; like what must the FAITH era fans have made of it? and it wasn't buried either it was Side 1 Track 3.

Mitchell's run would have gone on longer, but the mixes on the albums just after this period have the bass guitar up way too loud. (THESE ARE THE ONLY RECORDED WORKS IN THE HISTORY OF RECORDED WORKS WHERE THIS CAN BE SAID.)

Tangentially related: Best Stevie Wonder Single post-Original Musiquarium

The Joni run is great but I've gone off Blue in recent years and really the fact her best album, Court & Spark ends with such a terrible song still bugs me quite a bit.

I don't think that Court & Spark is Joni's best album, but I agree with you that it ends with a terrible song.