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Steve Lodder is a piano-playing musician living and working in London. He was first hooked on the music of Stevie Wonder in 1973, and has been listening to it, and playing it, ever since. Originally trained as a classical organ scholar at Cambridge University, Steve is now mainly involved in the crossover and world areas of jazz and improvised music, playing both acoustic and electric keyboard instruments. As well as composing for his own band, he has wit the likes of Paul McCartney, Andy Sheppard, George Russell and Annie Whitehead. Steve contributes columns to various music magazines and CD and instrument reviews for various publications and websites.

Stevie Wonder once said that the best way to understand him was just to listen to his music. That’s exactly what author Steve Lodder has done here, in tireless detail, in order to get close to the creative artist behind the global superstar.

He starts by tracing Stevie’s personal background and formative musical experiences, both onstage and in the Motown recording studio — from earliest career highs like ‘Fingertips’ and ‘Uptight (Everything’s Alright’, through his later teenage co-writes such as ‘I Was Made To Love Her’, ‘Until You Come Back To Me (That’s What I’m Gonna Do)’, ‘My Cherie Amour’, and ‘Signed, Seated, Delivered, I’m Yours’, to the beginnings of his ‘mature style’, with songs including ‘Do Yourself A Favor’, and ‘Never Dreamed You’d Leave In Summer’

The bulk of the book, Chapters 4-10, is given over to an almost bar-by-bar appraisal of Stevie’s most musically exhilarating and evocative works those five classic Seventies albums, from 1972’s Music Of My Mind to 1976’s Songs In The Key Of Life. It looks too at how each album functioned as a whole, both in terms of its construction and its impact on the music scene at the time And it pinpoints the crucial contributions and technical guidance of co-producers and synthesiser gurus Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff, who played a central rote in the sound of those seminal recordings.

Songs are also discussed in thematically linked groupings so for instance there are specific explorations of Stevie’s funk leanings, his social, political commentaries, his pure pop statements, and his more emotionally potent ballads, as well as his Latin, jazz, classical and various esoteric influences.

The book comes up to date with an overview of later works, from Secret Life Of Plants and Hotter Than July to Conversation Peace without shrinking from criticism of the often unconvincing or at hest disappointing work of this period (however popular it may have been in sales terms) and includes some discussion of 2005’s much anticipated A Time 2 Love, Stevie’s first new album in ten years.