Steve Wonder (Steveland Hardaway Morris) was born in 1950 in Saginaw, Michigan. Wonder was born premature and was put into an incubator. When too much oxygen in the incubator caused cataracts to grow behind each eye, it left the infant blind. The family moved to Detroit when Wonder was 4, and he began singing and playing instruments in church at an early age. He took to the piano, congas, and harmonica in particular. He was educated at the Michigan School for the Blind in Lansing, Michigan where he was trained in classical piano. When he was eight his parents divorced four years later, at the age of twelve, Wonder was introduced to Ronnie White of the popular Motown act The Miracles, he brought Morris and his mother to Motown Records. Impressed by the young musician, Motown CEO Berry Gordy signed Morris to Motown's Tamla label with the name Little Stevie Wonder.
Little Wonder had his first major hit, "Fingertips (Pt. 2)", a 1963 single taken from a live recording of a Motor Town Revue performance. The song, featuring Wonder on vocals, bongos, and harmonica, and a young Marvin Gaye on drums, was a #1 hit on the US pop charts and launched him into the public consciousness. Dropping the "Little" from his moniker, Wonder went on to have a number of other hits during the mid-1960s, including "Uptight (Everything's Alright)", "With a Child's Heart", and "Blowin' in the Wind", a Bob Dylan cover which was one of the first songs to reflect Wonder's social consciousness.
By 1970, Wonder had scored more major hits, including "I Was Made to Love Her", "For Once in My Life", "My Cherie Amour", and "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours". Besides being one of the first songs on which Wonder serves as both songwriter and producer, "Signed, Sealed, Delivered" is one of the main showcases for his backup group Wonderlove, a trio which included at various times Minnie Riperton, Deniece Williams, Lynda Laurence, and Syreeta Wright, whom Wonder married on September 14, 1970, they divorced eighteen months later, but they continued to collaborate on musical projects.
Arguments over creative control had Wonder leave Motown, he independently recorded two albums, which he used as a bargaining tool while negotiating with Motown. Eventually, the label agreed to his demands for full creative control and the rights to his own songs, and Wonder returned to Motown in March 1972 with Music of My Mind, an album which is considered a classic of the era. Unlike most previous artist LPs on Motown, which usually consisted of a collection of singles, b-sides, and covers, Music of My Mind was an actual LP, a full-length artistic statement, and began a string of five albums released over a period of less than five years, that make up what is generally considered Stevie Wonder's classic period. October 1972's love album Talking Book featured the #1 pop and R&B hit "Superstition", which is one of the most distinctive examples of the sound of the clavinet. The song, originally intended for rock guitarist Jeff Beck. His third consecutive masterwork of the decade and his career, Innervisions, featuring the driving "Higher Ground" followed by the memorable epic "Living for the City" hits.
On August 6, 1973, just days after the release of Innervisions, Wonder was in a serious automobile accident while on tour, when a log from a truck went through a passenger window and struck him in the head. This left him in a coma for four days and resulted in a permanent loss of his sense of smell ! The album Fulfillingness' First Finale appeared in July 1974 and set two hits high on the pop charts: the #1 "You Haven't Done Nothin'" (a political protest song) and the Top Ten "Boogie On Reggae Woman". Wonder released what he intended as his magnum opus, the double album Songs in the Key of Life, in September 1976. Sprawling in style, unlimited in ambition, and sometimes lyrically difficult to fathom, the album was hard for some listeners to assimilate, yet is regarded by many as Wonder's crowning achievement and one of the most recognizable and accomplished albums in pop music history. The album became the first of an American artist to debut straight at #1 in the Billboard charts, where it remained for 14 non-consecutive weeks. Two tracks fairly jumped out of the radio with energy, becoming the #1 pop/r'n'b hits "I Wish" and "Sir Duke". Songs in the Key of Life won his third consecutive Album of the Year and two other Grammys.
Possibly exhausted by this concentrated and sustained level of creativity, Wonder stopped recording for three years.His tentative return was with a mostly instrumental soundtrack album for the film Journey through the Secret Life of Plants (1979). The 80's saw Wonder scoring his biggest hits and reaching an unprecedented level of fame evidenced by increased album sales. Hotter than July (1980) became Wonder's first platinum selling album, and its single "Happy Birthday" was a successful vehicle for his campaign to establish Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday as a national holiday. The album also included his Bob Marley tribute "Master Blaster (Jammin')", and the ballad, "Lately". In 1982, Wonder released a retrospective of his '70s work with Stevie Wonder's Original Musiquarium and included three more hit singles in his catalogue, including the ten-minute funk classic "Do I Do" (which included legendary jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie), "That Girl" (one of the year's biggest singles to chart on the R&B side) and "Ribbon in the Sky". 1984 saw the release of Wonder's soundtrack album for The Woman in Red, the smash hit "I Just Called to Say I Love You". The following year's In Square Circle featured the #1 pop hit "Part-Time Lover". He featured in Chaka Khan's "I Feel For You", playing his signature harmonica, aswell as on the Eurythmics' single, "There Must Be an Angel (Playing with My Heart)". By now, Stevie Wonder was an American icon.
After 1987's Characters LP, Wonder continued to release new material, but at a slower pace. He recorded a soundtrack album for Spike Lee's film Jungle Fever in 1991 with a video for "Gotta Have You", and released both Conversation Peace and the live album Natural Wonder during the same decade. Wonder's first new album in ten years, A Time to Love, was released on October 2005. The first single, "So What the Fuss", was released in April and features Prince on guitar and background vocals from En Vogue. A second single, "From the Bottom of My Heart" was a hit on adult-contemporary R&B radio. 2007 saw "A Wonder Summer's Night" , a 13 concert tour - his first U.S. tour in over ten years. Stevie is currently working on a new album titled The Gospel Inspired By Lula which will deal with the various spiritual and cultural crises facing the world
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Stevie Wonder - Anthology ( 74, 117min * 195mb)
A triple album collecting Stevie Wonders sixties work (1962-1969)
Stevie Wonder - Anthology ( * 97mb)
01 - Thank You (For Loving Me All The Way) (2:51)
02 - Contract On Love (2:04)
03 - Fingertips (Part II) (2:59)
04 - Workout Stevie, Workout (2:40)
05 - Castles In The Sand (2:08)
06 - Hey Harmonica Man (2:36)
07 - High Heel Sneakers (3:05)
08 - Uptight (Eveything's Alright) (2:52)
09 - Nothing's Too Good For My Baby (2:35)
10 - Blowin' In The Wind (3:28)
11 - Ain't That Asking For Trouble (2:41)
12 - I'd Cry (2:31)
13 - A Place In The Sun (2:48)
14 - Sylvia (2:29)
15 - Down To Earth (2:46)
16 - Thank You Love (2:53)
17 - Hey Love (2:44)
18 - Travelin' Man (2:49)
19 - Until You Come Back To Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do) (2:57)
20 - I Was Made To Love Her (2:34)
21 - I'm Wondering (2:50)
Stevie Wonder - Anthology 2 ( * 098mb)
22 - Shoo Be Doo Be Doo Da Day (2:41)
23 - You Met Your Match (2:36)
24 - I'd Be A Fool Right Now (2:54)
25 - Alfie (3:10)
26 - More Than A Dream (3:46)
27 - For Once In My Life (2:45)
28 - Angie Girl (2:57)
29 - My Cherie Amour (2:51)
30 - Don't Know Why I Love You (2:43)
31 - If I Ruled The World (3:33)
32 - Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday (3:01)
33 - Never Had A Dream Come True (3:10)
34 - Signed, Sealed, Delivered (2:34)
35 - Heaven Help Us All (3:12)
36 - I Gotta Have A Song (2:32)
37 - Never Dreamed You'd Leave In Summer (2:56)
38 - If You Really Love Me (2:58)
39 - Something Out Of The Blue (2:58)
40 - Do Yourself A Favour (6:01)
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Stevie Wonder - Songs In The Key Of Life (76 ^ 198mb)
Songs in the Key of Life became the best-selling and most critically acclaimed album of Stevie Wonder's career. It won a Grammy Award for Best Male Pop Vocal and Album of the Year. The album also topped Billboard's Pop Albums and Black Albums charts for a record breaking 14 weeks out its 44 week in the Top 40 alone, and was one of the first albums by a solo artist to debut at #1 in its first week of sales. Unfortuantely my bonus single has gone awol, so you'll have to do without..for those that haven't bought the cd and or remaster and find vinyl ripping impossible-without a player here's your chance to reconnect...
01 - Love's In Need Of Love Today (7:02)
02 - Have A Talk With God (2:40)
03 - Village Ghetto Land (3:22)
04 - Contusion (3:43)
05 - Sir Duke (3:49)
06 - I Wish (4:10)
07 - Knocks Me Off My Feet (3:34)
08 - Pastime Paradise (3:24)
09 - Summer Soft (4:10)
10 - Ordinary Pain (6:12)
11 - Isn't She Lovely (6:30)
12 - Joy Inside My Tears (6:25)
13 - Black Man (8:18)
14 - Ngiculela - Es Una Historia - I Am Singing (3:46)
15 - If It's Magic (3:10)
16 - As (7:04)
17 - Another Star (7:57)
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All downloads are in * ogg-7 (224k) or ^ ogg-9(320k), artwork is included , if in need get the nifty ogg encoder/decoder here !
Cool post. I had the anthology on vinyl but never managed to rip it. Then I bought it on CD just to find afterwards that I'd be a fool right now was missing.
ReplyDeleteThank you for this.Plastik44