From 1972-74, with Wonder writing the songs and Cecil and Margouleff programming the sounds, they would make four landmark albums: “Music of My Mind,” “Talking Book,” “Innervisions” and “Fulfillingness’ First Finale.” In their test run - a three-day weekend working together in the studio - Wonder wrote 17 songs. Billing themselves as Tonto’s Expanding Head Band, Margouleff and Cecil made a 1971 album of synthesizer pieces, “ Zero Time,” and Wonder heard in it the possibilities for sounds he wanted to summon from his keyboards. Margouleff and Cecil had connected modules and keyboards from Moog, Arp and other manufacturers and figured out a way for the formerly incompatible devices to control one another. In what were still the early days of synthesizers, Cecil and Margouleff had constructed a Frankenstein monster of an instrument they called TONTO (which they retronymed The Original New Timbral Orchestra). He made an unexpected choice for starters: Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff, a team of musicians, producers and engineers. From then on, he would write and produce his own songs, release albums when he decided they were finished and choose his own collaborators. Other labels were eager to sign him, and when he returned to the Black-owned Motown, he had won complete creative control for himself. Wonder’s first Motown Records contract ended as he turned 21 in 1971. 1 song with an irresistibly exuberant live recording: “Fingertips, Pt. And its album cover - which showed Wonder wearing African-style robes and braided hair in a quasi-Biblical desert landscape (actually Los Angeles) - made clear that Wonder’s futurism was unmistakably Afrofuturism.Īlthough Wonder had just reached voting age, he was no novice when he made “Music of My Mind” and “Talking Book.” They were his 14th and 15th albums in a decade-long career that stretched back to his days as Little Stevie Wonder, who was just 13 when he had his first No.
“Talking Book” reaffirmed that, and also extended his sonic and technological ambitions, as he used state-of-the-art synthesizers and an arsenal of studio effects to orchestrate his songs with startlingly novel sounds.
Wonder had given signs on earlier albums, particularly his self-produced “Where I’m Coming From” (1971), that he would not just be writing love songs. It demonstrated, with the international smash “Superstition,” that Wonder didn’t need Motown’s “hit factory” methods - songwriters and producers providing material that singers would dutifully execute - to have a No. “Talking Book” was a breakthrough on multiple fronts.
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