Stevie Wonder

A Time To Love finds Stevie Wonder in high spirits, his rueful chuckle on missing "Moon Blue"'s top note telling its own story. "Sweetest Somebody" plays like an updated "Isn't She Lovely," and "Please Don't Hurt My Baby" proves his storytelling is intact, but the star of the show is the "Passionate Raindrops" vocal.

Complain all you want about Stevie Wonder taking his sweet time -- ten years of it in this
case -- to deliver a new record. On A Time to Love, the soul giant (and notoriously fussy
producer) used that go-slow approach where it really counts: in the grooves. The best
tracks on this much-superior follow-up to 1995's flabby Conversation Peace reconnect
Wonder with a key trait of "Superstition" and much of his storied Seventies outp... More >

Right, what you feared--mostly mush. Since mush has been his specialty for almost 30 years--that is, since he was 26 years old--why anybody should expect him to turn into Bob Marley now beats me. I just marvel that the mush continues so tasty. The melodies don't falter, and Wonder's unexpectedly and perhaps unfortunately influential vocal attack is as mellifluous as ever. Credit his laziness, or maybe it's perfectionism. His touring schedule is nonexistent, and in the time he took for one album, fellow aging melodist Paul McCartney, for instance, chose to release four plus (don't tell Stevie, he might try again) a faux symphony. And speaking of McCartney, this stuff isn't all mush. Wonder's politics are moralistic and universalist. But he's as faithful to them as he is to the lady or ladies in his songs. (Grade - A-)