Stevie Wonder on Keys of Life

I remember hearing an album by Sam Cooke. [singing] I think melodies are like, you know, angels from heaven expressing a place for the heart to follow. [singing] I think, also, I think the voice has a lot to do with your spirit. I think if your spirit feels right, then the voice will stay pretty consistently the same from that point of maturity. [signing]  Ya’ll gotta be quiet or don’t talk that loud.

This sort of fun you have is it the same way that you behave when you were like little Stevie when you were like 12 years old.

Yes.

Yes.

Oh, yeah. I’m going to always feel that way.

Were you like that on the bus during the kind of Motown tours and revues?  

I’m probably worse now. You know, in America if African Americans we say for our hair, if your hair is real coarse so you call it nappy, you know, “You got nappy hair.” So I remember once I woke up one time, I was asleep on the bus and The Temptations were there. I don’t know, I was half asleep, I said, “Oh, my hair hurts me!” [laughs] He says, “What?” I think it was Paul Williams said, “You’re hair is so nappy, it hurts. Your hair that hurts you. Your hair is hurting you.” So they used to call me Nappy Wonder.

Looking back on when you were a little nappy headed boy, what were the things that got you through the hardships of your childhood?

I think that I really didn’t understand the severity of the situation or the circumstances. I think I was so in love with my mother, and my brothers, my sister, my friends, and just in love with the discovery of life itself that my focus was not on those things. I think I discovered a whole thing of color when I went down south once when my grandmother passed away. There were some kids, white kids that lived nearby or whatever. The kids said, “Hey, nigger!” Whatever they said.

Had you heard that word before?

I think I may have heard it, but I said, “What, I’m from Detroit.” I started throwing rocks over. “Oh you better not do that, you’ll get into trouble.” I said, “I don’t care.” I hit the kid, I kept throwing stuff. I just… I have never accepted stupidity and ignorance as making me then determine how good I was or how less I was.

Since I can best remember, I’ve had a great relationship with God. For me, God was like a father. It was always someone that I could touch and that he had me in his arms. I always felt that way. I always felt that God was about good but for instance, when I was in church, I was in a Pentecostal church as a little boy, and back then it was a little different than now. They said, “You’re singing that worldly music.” They were criticizing what I was doing. Listen, we live in a society where black music one time it was called race music, where jazz was considered something nasty. I don’t know. I felt that if God didn’t want me to sing it, he wouldn’t have given me the talent to do it.

What is your final deadline for this record? Are you days away from finishing?

We are hopefully days away, yes. Hopefully days away but creativity overrules punctuality. It’s like if you have an article you have to do, you try your best to do it. When it’s not happening, you turn it in, you’re not happy with the article that you’ve written.

That’s right.

Then you spend the rest of your life kicking yourself in the ass. As they say in England, “kicking yourself in your arse.”

Behind.

Oh, they say behind. I’m sorry. (LAUGHS)