Stevie Wonder has been laying low for the past five years. He couldn't help writing a few songs to fill out the hits compilation 'Original Musiquarium I,' or knocking out soundtrack ditties for 'The Woman in Red'; the man has hit making in his blood. Yet he must have gone through some kind of crisis, because not since 1980's 'Hotter Than July' has he released a full-length, stand-on-its-own album. Since he's waited that long, the new album, 'In Square Circle,' takes on the lineaments of a major statement – but the statement is, No change here.
'In Square Circle' will segue into any Wonder song since the mid-Seventies; like them, it revels in bubbling synthesizers, jazzy chords,
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puppy-friendly lyrics and, most of all, melodies that stick to your pleasure centers like audio caramel. It has all the stuff Little Stevie Wonder soaked up as a child star at Motown in the 1960s, before he broke away from the hit factory: the neatly tucked-in, crossover-ready hints of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley and, naturally, first-generation Motown, as in the new album's "Part-Time Lover."
There are love songs waiting for their Grammy Awards, a poor-folks number or two and even a message tune (à la "Happy Birthday" and "Don't Drive Drunk"), "It's Wrong (Apartheid)," which will probably have P.W. Botha tapping his toes. From now till Christmas, you'll be hearing the album on CHR and adult-contemporary and rock formats – maybe even MTV, which just barely got around to playing Wonder's "I Just Called to Say I Love You" when it was Number One – and you'll be humming along.
Like Musiquarium, In Circle Square has a concept per side: love songs on side one, social-comment songs on side two (although Wonder inserts one more slice of dreaminess, "Overjoyed," before he denounces apartheid). Wonder has already written so many memorable tunes that perhaps his new songs can't help looking back to their predecessors; you can flip through your collection and connect the chromatics of "I Love You Too Much" to "You've Got It Bad Girl," the beat and the keyboard tones of "Go Home" to "All I Do," or the sweep of "Whereabouts" back to "Ribbon in the Sky" and "Lately," if that's your idea of a good time.
Along with his sense of harmony, though, Wonder sounds so trademarked because he keeps things smooth. All around him, people are using synthesizers for blips and crunches and zaps; Wonder prefers throooms and doo-wahs – sustained sounds, or, for rhythm, a ripple here and there.
Sonically, what's new is Wonder's playful ease with digitally sampled sounds, probably from a Fairlight. The instrument can take a real-world noise, analyze it and spread it up and down a keyboard for various manipulations. Instead of scat-singing in "Stranger on the Shore of Love," he takes a digitally sampled "doo" and plays leaping keyboard solos; the splashes in "Overjoyed" are probably digital, as are the metallic noises in "It's Wrong" an
