Stevie’s first album with Cecil and Margouleff was a complete break from his own back catalogue and the Motown sound. Music of My Mind is full of brand new synthesised textures and effects, perfectly integrated with Stevie’s drums and keys playing. Including the deceptively tragic ‘Superwoman’ (about the collapse of his marriage to Syreeta), the ebullient ‘I Love Every Little Thing About You’ and the elongated prog-funk of ‘Love Having You Around,’ it lacked a big hit single and wasn’t popular with Motown at the time, but it remains a superb work and an exciting precursor of what was to come. 

Don’t let the idea that Stevie Wonder’s purest stretch of soul-auteur genius kicked off with Talking Book distract you from the fact that he’d released another album earlier in the year that made his breathtaking ’70s run seem inevitable. Music of My Mind was the first LP Stevie cut under a renegotiated Motown contract that allowed him total artistic control. And he took advantage of that freedom to usher synthesized music from prog, novelty, and experimental circles directly into the pop-music mainstream. From the slick sotto voce talk box on “Love Having You Around” to the unprecedentedly soulful take on analog synth melodies on “Evil” to the one-man-band expressiveness allowed by state-of-the-art multitracking, it’s one of those epiphany moments where technology and creativity discover they’re not at odds after all — in fact, they’re interdependent. And since Wonder’s artistic curiosity was only matched by his young-lifer ease with melodic ambition, it sounds timelessly prescient no matter how Nixon-era the actual tech was. Give anyone else access to the TONTO synth-studio and see if they get an “I Love Every Little Thing About You” or a “Keep on Running” out of it.