Stevie Wonder, performing at Cosmo, draws on experience for evolving musical motivation

Stevie Wonder is seldom in a hurry.

Not when he speaks, as he tends to wander through a maze of ideas and observations at his leisure, the storytelling equivalent of taking the scenic route home.

He can -- and does -- weave allusions to Copernicus, Jay-Z and Malcolm X into the same tapestry of thought when asked about something as seemingly straightforward as his current creative motivations.

Nor does Wonder rush his music, having put out two studio albums in the past 17 years.

His songs are, above all else, about life, and he knows that he has to live it in order to sing about it.

The passing of time, then, looms large in Wonder's work -- next year will mark the 50th anniversary of his first album -- because so much of his catalog is posited on moving forward, progressing, in both individual and societal terms, and how times have changed is a marker of said growth.

This has been a constant in Wonder's career for nearly as long as he'd had one to speak of.

"When I was maybe 14, 15, I would hear the songs by Bob Dylan and The Staple Singers and various speeches from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or President Kennedy, and I felt that there was a kind of excitement that they had in their voices, wanting for there to be change," Wonder recalls. "It was like, 'OK, I like this.' All these songs that were coming out with people taking positions, the peace marches that people were doing, all that stuff I was not really a part of, but my heart was all the way in there. I just felt so much inspiration from that."

This can be heard clearly in Wonder's vast output, which has consistently pushed hard against boundaries of all kinds, be it those from record companies, music fans, the powers that be, even technology.

A brief sampling: He fought for a then-unprecedented measure of artistic control with albums such as 1972's "Music of My Mind," refused to be pigeonholed as R&B with the forward-looking, sub-rock thrust of "Talking Book," incorporated an early form of the sampler into the soundtrack for "Journey through the Secret Life of Plants" and campaigned in song for Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday to become a national holiday on "Hotter Than July."

Wonder's idealism was not always welcomed at the time.

He didn't care.

"We can't shut up because of those of us who don't want to move forward," he says. "My thing was, I had my feelings. There were those who told me when I was doing the (Martin Luther King Jr.) holiday thing, 'Don't do that. That's not good. You're going to mess your career up.' But if I had believed them, then today, we wouldn't have a day where we can celebrate every single person who lived and died for the unity of all people."

Throughout the course of a 30-minute conversation, Wonder echoes that sentiment, of disparate peoples coming together, on several occasions.

He's spent a fair amount of his adult life on the road, interacting with different cultures, and it's clearly affected his perspective.

"You go to different places, you hear different kinds of instruments, you get different views on how people have a different outlook on something," he says. "All of those things are a part of discovery. In those discoveries, all of that influences how you write, what you might write about. You may not write about a particular place that you might be at specifically, but it might influence a thought."

Those thoughts have taken myriad forms over the years and continue to fan out in various directions.

What motivates Wonder to write a song today isn't what it was yesterday.

"It's relative to wherever you are in life, in time," Wonder says. "How I feel about life and being in love and family and music, appreciating it. All those things are still there, but we get into different phases of life. We're all evolving.

"Life goes on," he says, completing the thought. "And that's a good thing."

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@review
journal.com or 702-383-0476.