046/ Wondrous Stevie doc + Tom White's new project
Unexpectedly, the finest doc I’ve encountered this year is not a film or TV show, but a podcast series.
Wesley Morris fronts landmark new audio series The Wonder Of Stevie, which just published as a bundle. The series focuses on the peerless run of five albums released by young Stevie Wonder from 1970-1976, as he turned 21 and regained creative control from Motown, for whom he’d signed (and gone on to produce buckets of hits) as a child prodigy.
Honestly, I cannot praise this show enough. The Wonder Of Stevie is as exhaustively researched, poetically written and tightly edited as the finest BBC history documentary, yet at the same time, it comes exuberantly presented by Morris, wears its high budget and high status with unabashed confidence, and foregrounds Black identity in the telling in the most rewarding way. It’s snackable or binge-able, never lets up the pace, and a long list of music legends contribute, in interview and archive. The Obamas are onboard as producers, as well as being (always lively) talking heads. The Wonder Of Stevie has something of the joyous, yet rhythmically taut energy of Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson’s extraordinary Disney concert film from two years ago, The Summer Of Soul (on which Wonder was the opening contributor) and so, given everything going on here musically as well, it’s no surprise when Questlove shows up as exec producer and talking head.
Stevie Wonder has been in my mind fair bit, on-and-off this year. Back in February I wrote here about that Netflix film The Greatest Night In Pop on the recording session for ‘We Are The World’. Wonder’s presence in that film is absolute joyous batshittery. It made me think, back then, of how under-rated he can be, in conversations around the pop canon.
As The Wonder Of Stevie points out (then sets out to firmly counter) one odd thing about Wonder is he’s so deeply embedded into mainstream culture, yes in an iconic, historic, but also in a comfortable sense, that he almost gets overlooked as a pure musical force. Certainly as a pioneer in music tech, which he undoubtedly was too. This run of five early 1970s albums, his ‘classic albums era’ used as a focus for the show, is objectively as pure great a run of records as anyone — Prince, Madonna, Bowie, The Beatles, Beyoncé, Bruce — anyone! — ever achieved in popular music history. For a kid in his early twenties, it seems unfathomable: at the end of that five album stretch, his legend deeply etched into the fabric of soul, pop, rocknroll, as Songs In The Key Of Life comes out, Wonder is just twenty-six years old. Compare that to, say, Springsteen, who reaches twenty-six years old only two albums in, before his first masterpiece Born To Run is even finished.
The series chimed with me from the get-go, as Wesley Morris talked about first encountering Stevie Wonder in an early episode of The Cosby Show, when Denise crashes her car into Stevie’s limo, leading to an episode-long cameo and the Huxtable family visiting Stevie’s studio. I can’t remember which came first for me, that, or the cheesy eighties mega-hit ballad ‘I Just Called To Say I Love You’, but this comfortable, established Wonder is how I first discovered him too, as a kid, without any knowledge of his earlier fire. I only encountered the classic albums much later in my teens and didn’t truly appreciate them til in my thirties, to my shame.
If your curiosity is peaked by this outrageously great podcast series, I’d also vouch for spending an hour, or a few, deep diving YouTube for Stevie Wonder live footage from across his career, just for kicks. The breadth of it is a marvel.
The Wonder Of Stevie is wherever you get pods and if you’re subscribed to Audible there’s also a very funny bonus interview episode.
A big shout for White Magic For Lovers’ debut…
Thomas White may be the most singularly gifted non-famous music artist I’ve ever crossed paths with. With (similarly ridiculously talented) brother Alex, in their mid-teens they became full-on precocious pop stars, in the visionary, progressive Brighton band Electric Soft Parade, before spending several heady indie years in that spiky, hilarious buzz-pop group Brakes. After that, the White brothers appeared to cut ties with the industry, pushed corporates away altogether and Tom embarked on a beautiful, fragile creative career outside of their reach. Tom has produced so much thought-provoking, gorgeous work — visual art as well as music (I have a small sculpture of a giraffe’s head gazing out across my living room that is Tom’s work) — contributing to terrific bands, Fuschia Days, currently Graham Coxon and Rose Elinor Dougall’s outfit The Waeve, an occasional ringer for British Sea Power, many more. Partly I love Tom for never compromising the making: I’m just never let down.
Tom’s new project is White Magic For Lovers, with debut single ‘Count The Rings’ (YouTube link) just released on the siblings’ in-house DIY label Chord Orchard. Presumably named for the Drugstore album, WMFL’s opening statement is an entirely choral piece that both stands unique and feels like a curtain drawn open: lyrically slippery, a mirror, melodically — effortlessly — classicist, with no instruments apart from multi-tracked voice, it draws you deeply into Tom’s world in under three minutes, could (almost) have been composed at any point in the past thousand years, yet at the same time sounds utterly contemporary.
This never gives the game away of how White Magic For Lovers might actually unfold as a project, going forward. A bit like boygenius opening their live shows, offstage, singing their a cappella song together, it evokes the powerful sense of anything can happen now. Still, I love this song so much, in and of itself. “What is sober on my own?” Tom asks, before devolving into a looped phrase, “count the rings and pack the boxes”. Bewitching, translucent.
Writing about it for The Quietus, Robert Barry name-checks the Beach Boys and Anohni. He’s not wrong. Please check out White Magic For Lovers.
icymi —
Because I haven’t published one of these Double Choruses for a while, this list has gotten out of hand, now way too long and unwieldy for easy consumption. But I couldn’t bring myself to delete anything. So apologies, it’s all worth your time, at some point...
• Laura Barton’s beautiful obituary of Kris Kristofferson in The Guardian.
• The new Billy Reeves single ‘Better Than Wages’ is a radical stormer from Billy’s incoming third LP When Lord God Almighty Reads The News. This fertile Billy Reeves era is overwhelming, and quite brilliant. He’s creating buckets of gorgeous visual art and releasing more than one album per year.
• A second unflinching belter on Gaza from Macklemore: ‘Hind’s Hall 2’.
• Fancy a Barbra Streisand deep dive? London Review Of Books dug into Streisand’s epic memoir: here’s Malin Hay’s 6,000 word essay ‘This Singing Thing’ and here’s the podcast episode in which Hay talks Streisand with Thomas Jones.
• ZEF: The Story of Die Antwoord is now available on Prime. Whether you’ve followed the journey of the incendiary South African duo or not, this doc is worth a look. Thanks Ben for this tip.
• MJ Lenderman’s late night debut, ‘Wristwatch’ on Jimmy Fallon, the guitars and pedal-steel jamming at the end are magical.
• Hard to believe it, but Soul Coughing have reformed. Here’s ‘Super Bon Bon’ on Jimmy Kimmel’s show. Their sound hasn’t dated at all.
• Tom Williams shared this with me, thanks Tom: the ‘making of’ YouTube doc for Lizzy McAlpine’s new album Older is interesting, even if you’re not a fan. Her process is unexpectedly labyrinthine. I can’t quite get into McAlpine’s stuff, though she has great qualities as a songwriter and new single ‘Pushing It Down And Praying’ from the deluxe version of Older is a terrific piece of writing. But I’ve still not yet truly escaped the ‘Phoebe lite’ vibe enough to enjoy the record properly, as much as others rate her, or as much as I’d hope I would. Still, very worth checking out.
• I reviewed Atlanta duo Coco & Clair Clair’s new LP Girl for The Quietus.