Soundbreaking - Stevie Wonder

And the next thing we know there's a knocking at the door and there's Stevie in a shark truce jumpsuit , five or six o'clock at night with our album under his arm .

And he wanted to know how we were making this kind of music .

I called Bob on the phone and said , get over here , we've got a new client and we let him in the studio and we didn't wake up for another five years in that , hey , Steve walked into that studio .

He had so many songs in his head that had been pent up in there for so many years .

I , I don't know , Motown had him on a formula jo hard to sit day that scrub and you , she hardly gets a bit Motown uh treats their artists .

They have almost like a finishing school .

So the way the artists dressed , um the way they performed on stage all cultivated .

So as not to offend what were considered mainstream white sensibilities .

And Steve turned 21 and he was really fed up with it and he's finally reached his majority .

Said I'm over , I'm leaving and he came to New York and we just started recording .

It was like , uh they were working on Frankenstein .

I made just up all day , all night and coming up with these nuances and timbres , one slight touch of a button could give you a whole another color .

So Malcolm and Bob's , the whole job was to figure out , you know , what colors were inside of his head .

I had a two track tape running at all times because that's where most of the ideas came from .

And I'd say , hey , is that a song ?

And he'd play back something that he was just musing around and he'd go Yeah , man .

Yeah .

And then we get an idea of off we go , we recorded well in excess of 250 songs .

When we finally got to making an album , we said , oh , we'll take this one and that one and somehow for five years we could do nothing wrong .

Every record we touched turned to gold , Grammys , platinum , gold is be Stevie Wonder was able to take all the innovations and then just bring it to a level that was so simple to understand was funky enough for soul people and rock people and music lovers in general to , to appreciate it .

That's hard to do .

I feel like this .

Ok .

There's still a lot of controversy because people feel like if you introduce electronics , you're sort of changing the nature of the sound .

Some people are against this and Stevie not only embraces it , he , I think leads the pack .