Biography
7. Does Love for One Another Have To End
By this time Steve's life was undergoing other changes. His marriage
with Syreeta was on the rocks. Their life together was becoming
troubled and difficult.
She's a Leo, and I'm a Taurus, and,
phew, that's like putting two sticks of dynamite together!
Though it eventually ended in divorce, they would still work closely
together. Stevie wrote the song 'Cause We've Ended As Lovers which
was later included on a Syreeta album. The lyrics related some of
his thoughts on the divorce:
'Cause we've ended now as lovers
Does it mean that we
each other can't be friends
Cause we've ended now
as lovers
Does our love for one
another have to end
The first single culled from
Music of My Mind
was Superwoman.
The album track was really two songs cleverly merged into one,
Superwoman
and Where Were
You When I Needed You.
The former tells of a love going sour because of the ambitions of
two persons, pulling the relationship in different directions. And
the latter a seperation and desperate plea to mend an inevitable
break up. The other song released as a single was
Keep On Running.
Neither fared very well on the charts, but they were tasters for
great things to come.
Alongside his work on
Music of My Mind,
Stevie also produced an album entitled,
Syreeta,
for Syreeta. Containing 9 songs 7 written by Stevie and Syreeta,
one, What Love
Has Joined Together
by Smokey Robison, and the Beatles'
She's Leaving Home.
In addition to doing most of the instrumentation, he also sang the
intro verse on
To Know You Is To Love You.
An excellent album illustrating Stevie's new found freedom and
blossoming use of the synthesizers.
Stevie's
follow up album to
Music of My Mind
was soon in coming. It
was evident that Stevie had accumulated many songs during his
recording stint working on
Music of My Mind,
and six months after this,
Talking Book
was ready for the world. The cover photo on
Talking Book
is of a reflective
Stevie
sitting on an arid hillside. A very poignant picture taken by Robert
Margoulef.
Talking Book is
a more finished album than
Music of My Mind.
It manages to maintain the high vitality of that record while
cutting back on the jiving around.
The sum total is a tight, hard-hitting, solidly professional
product which went platinum. It was as if, with the first flush of
freedom over, Stevie could now relax into full artistic control. The
spontaneity had always been there; what he had found now was a
little more self-discipline. The album begins with the lovely
You Are The Sunshine Of
My Life and ends
with the endearing
I Believe (When I Fall
In Love). In
between we have slices of funk, ballad, social commentary and jazz.
Superstition was
the first single taken from the album. A very hard hitting funky
number criticizing those people who are dictated to by such beliefs
because
When you believe in things that you don't understand
Then you suffer.
Lucidly he points out how self-destructive superstition and
ignorance are.
Superstition
made it all the way to the top of the charts. This was soon to be
followed by You
Are The Sunshine of My Life.
If
you happen to have a copy of the first pressing of
Talking Book,
and if you know how to read Braille, you can touch Stevie's own
words about the record:
Here is my music. It is all that I have
to tell you how I feel. Know that your love keeps my love strong -
Stevie.
