Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life (33 1/3)

A good book in agood series of books.

"Songs in the Key of Life," Zeth Lundy's contribution to the 33 1/3 series, is a great installment to an excellent series. The author describes and discusses the making of Stevie Wonder's 1976 release with a interesting spin, dividing its 21 compositions into five catagories/chapters: Birth, Innocence, Experience, Death and Transcendence. He uses his research to illustrate this method in very fine fashion. I must admit, it was a difficult read for me and may be for others. There are a lot of "big" words in it, which is the reason it gets four stars rather than five, but in the end, the book is informative, expressive, entertaining and surprisingly objective. As a HUGE Stevie Wonder fan and music journalist, I must say that this book is wonderful, no pun intented.

Book was interesting, but written on a professional music critic level. A lot of deep analysis on equipment and not reviewed for the average person who might buy this. Great writing, too detailed.

I'm starting to get a headache and thinking of asking for a refund on this one.The text in the book is poorly printed. Each page has something off about the text. Over here it's too short, over there someone used too much ink, next page there's not enough ink. Letters are of inconsistent size and fullness. Partial letters abound. Bloomsbury really screwed the pooch on this one.

At 151 pages in length if you manage to get through this it will seem like twice that length. Ponderous pompous pseudo-intellectual writing style which in the end lends nothing to appreciating one of the great musical creations of the 20th century. Skip this book and just enjoy listening to the album and relating to it as you see fit.

Ditto what many others have said re the pretentious and unnecessary verbosity and lack of actual useful and insightful information about the actual making of this album. How could such a poor writer be given the responsibility of writing about this fabulous and important recording? So incredibly disappointing.

I don't mind the torrent of words or the specific vocabulary choices the author makes. But if you're a musician or producer looking for clues on how this album was crafted, this is NOT the book for you. This is a very long esoteric expository opinionated review of the work. I already know what I think about this project. I already know why I like various tracks. I don't need this. Only rarely will he reveal some piece of non-opinionated fact of production and that's what I was looking for. But if you long to be a pop music critic writer, this would be a valuable read to analyze.

Zeth Lundy wastes the opportunity to write about one of the greatest musical statements in pop/soul music in order to gargle his cynical opinions with a pretentious vocabulary that requires a close-at-hand dictionary to decipher. Don't bother...the opinions are not worth the effort to understand. Stevie Wonder's album speaks to the heart, Lundy's words can only be for his own amusement.

Brilliant analysis of a seminal album. Soul music is too often overlooked when it comes to classic albums, and this 70s slice of stunning musicianship gets its due with this entry in the addictive mini-book series. Stevie produced a run of flawless, inventive and hugely influential albums over a five-year period in the decade, culminating with this masterpiece. The writing is accessible and authoritative, and fully does justice to the sheer variety of musical styles to be found on 'Songs...'

Stevie Wonder's Song In The Key of Life is perhaps the key album amongst several that form one of the greatest runs of creativity in pop music. This book does the album justice with insightful analysis and revealing details of how the album came to be.