1995: Natural Wonder, Stevie Wonder

By Alex Lewis

“My song is on.”

That’s what my mom would say as she drove past our house. She would circle the block and let the radio play, beautifully singing every word to songs like Luther Vandross’ “I’d Rather” and Phyllis Hyman’s “The Answer Is You.”

I would sing along too, her little shadow belting out with my prepubescent voice, “I was just a rider on the storm / I needed love to keep me warm.” And I’d put a little flair on it. Whatever I could do to make my mom laugh. The things we do when we never want to see someone we love cry again.

Growing up playing sports, I spent plenty of time in my mom’s car. Getting driven to and from practices, games, and wherever we had to go for whatever obscure piece of sports equipment I needed next. And I only got to hear my music in her car if she let me stay in while she ran into the store.

My mom’s car was her concert venue. And though I didn’t always realize it then, I was lucky enough to have a front-row seat. Looking back now, I fondly remember many of the songs I heard her sing — that we sang together — as the outside zoomed by.

When I left for college, my grandma’s car became mine. It didn’t have an aux cord, just a six-disc CD changer I filled with burnt discs of my favorite albums. Despite not having money for gas, I regularly offered my friends rides. Many of the albums we listened to — Channel Orange, good kid, m.A.A.d city, Take Care—became the soundtrack for our first years at college.

And while repetition built our love for these albums, I assumed the responsibility of ensuring they didn’t get stale. So I did what I could to bring new music into the mix. Sometimes this meant rummaging through my mom’s CD collection whenever I returned home.

She had one of those metal CD towers that could hold 100 albums, and every shelf was full. Each hunt was like a music history lesson.

One day while digging, I came across a Stevie Wonder album I had never seen before called Natural Wonder. It consisted of two discs with live performances spanning Stevie’s discography.

Before that trip, my homie J.T. had begun educating me on the wonders of Stevie’s 1976 album, Songs In The Key Of Life. I recognized many of its songs on Natural Wonder, including “Love’s In Need Of Love Today,” “Village Ghetto Land,” and more.

I can’t remember if I asked my mom for the CD or not, but it truly doesn’t matter. Natural Wonder entered the rotation, and that’s when it became real to me just how incredibly talented Stevie Wonder is.

Stevie released Natural Wonder in 1995, the year after I was born, and recorded the songs during tour stops in Osaka, Japan, and Tel Aviv. Backed by different symphony orchestras conducted by Henry Panion III, who attended my hometown Ohio State University and arranged compositions for Stevie for 30 years, Wonder breathed new life into songs from as early as 1969 (“My Cherie Amour”) to 1995 (“Tomorrow Robins Will Sing”).

But one night driving around, like my mom and I would do growing up, Stevie’s performance of “Ribbon In The Sky,” a song originally recorded for his 1982 album, Original Musiquarium I, breathed new life into me.

While the melody felt familiar, I couldn’t pick up on where I had heard it before. But as Stevie shared with Barney Hoskins during a 2005 PBS interview, “Melodies are like… angels from heaven expressing a place for the heart to follow.” And throughout the eight minutes and 37 seconds of Stevie’s “Ribbon In The Sky” performance, my heart followed through every winding road, every playful turn.

That’s one of my favorite things about Stevie. He lets himself play. He allows himself to be silly. On an episode of Superstars and Their Moms that Stevie did in 1988 with his late mother, Lula Mae Hardaway, he says about himself while toying on the piano, “Guy just can’t keep it cool. He’s gotta get silly.”

And on Stevie’s rendition of “Ribbon In The Sky” from Natural Wonder, you can hear that silliness when he goes back and forth with the saxophonist while he plays the harmonica. And even toward the end, Stevie shares a playful moment with the crowd as he growls through a call-and-response. The things we do to make those we love laugh.

But in that same episode of Superstars and Their Moms, Stevie gathers himself when describing his mother. “Let’s stop messing around here,” he says. “She’s like brown skin. She’s a wonderful person. The beauty of her outwardly could never compare to inwardly. But yet the beauty of her outwardly is as beautiful as anyone in the world.”

Similarly, Stevie gathers himself at the end of “Ribbon In The Sky,” belting two 10-second runs to close the song. It is one of the most impressive vocal performances I’ve ever heard.

“Ribbon In The Sky” is the song I think about when people talk about how talented Stevie is. How he’s one of the greatest artists of all time. It’s the song I thought about when my mom told me she planned to see Stevie Wonder live in Charlotte. And it’s the song that made me tell her she wasn’t seeing Stevie Wonder without me.

So on November 14, 2015, almost 20 years to the day Stevie released Natural Wonder, my mom and I went to his Songs In The Key Of Life tour at Time Warner Cable Arena. The night before, a series of coordinated attacks tragically occurred in Paris, France, killing at least 130 people and injuring more than 400. With a heavy but hopeful heart, Stevie stepped to the microphone and reminded us, “If we could just love a little more and care a little more, how much greater this planet would be.”

That night, Stevie performed, in its entirety, the album that begins with the words, “Love’s in need of love today.” And it felt like there was no better person at no better time to deliver that message — and no better person to share that moment with than my mom, both of us dancing to the rhythm of a love shaped between the shelves of a CD tower.

A mother’s music is akin to a mother’s love. And Stevie Wonder’s Natural Wonder is comprised of songs released throughout much of my mom’s life — many of which we heard that night, her and I creating new memories together.

The older I get, the more I realize how much my mom’s music taste has shaped mine. And even though I’m older now and our relationship continues to take on new forms, I liken the life we share to a live performance. An opportunity for us to breathe new life into the time we have left. And these songs are the melodies we get to follow wherever the drive takes us.

Alex Lewis is an essayist based in Columbus, Ohio. For his Substack newsletter,Feels Like Home, he writes about things he loves & the people and moments that have shaped him. He also hosts a monthly “Shut Up & Write” group on Columbus’ South Side and co-hosts theAlex + Koku podcast with Koku Asamoah. Follow Alex onInstagram andTwitter.