Stevie Wonder

Saginaw, then Hitsville

Stevland Hardaway Judkins was born in Saginaw, Michigan on 13 May 1950, premature and placed in an oxygen-rich incubator; the resulting retinopathy of prematurity left him blind. The family moved to Detroit, which put him within walking distance of the most productive record company in America at exactly the moment it needed a prodigy.

Motown signed him to its Tamla imprint in 1961, when he was eleven, and renamed him Little Stevie Wonder. The first real hit came two years later: a live recording of "Fingertips", harmonica and all, which made him at thirteen the youngest artist to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100. What followed was a decade inside the Motown machine — a run of singles cut to house specification, with the label controlling the material, the arrangements and the money.

The break came at twenty-one, when his childhood contract expired and he refused to re-sign on the old terms. The deal he eventually took gave him ownership of his publishing and, more consequentially for the records, full artistic control.

The four years that rewrote the rules

Between 1972 and 1976 Wonder released Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, Fulfillingness' First Finale and Songs in the Key of Life. He played most of the parts himself, built the records around the then-new polyphonic synthesiser rigs rather than around a rhythm section, and wrote about addiction, slum landlords and Richard Nixon alongside the love songs. Three of those albums took the Grammy for Album of the Year in consecutive ceremonies — still the only time one artist has managed it.

Songs in the Key of Life arrived on 28 September 1976 as a double LP with a bonus four-track EP tucked into the sleeve, after sessions so protracted that Motown staff reportedly wore T-shirts asking when it would be finished. It entered the Billboard 200 at number one, took Album of the Year in 1977, and has since gone Diamond and been admitted to both the Grammy Hall of Fame and the United States National Recording Registry. Herbie Hancock and George Benson are among the players on it.

Its reputation rests on range rather than on any single track. "Sir Duke" and "I Wish" are big-band and funk pastiches written by someone who clearly loved both; "Village Ghetto Land" is a synthesised string quartet over a description of poverty; "Pastime Paradise" would later be lifted almost whole by Coolio. "Isn't She Lovely", written for his newborn daughter Aisha, was never released as a single and is sung back at him in arenas regardless.

The long middle

Wonder has spent the five decades since in a different mode: fewer albums, more institutional recognition. "I Just Called to Say I Love You" took the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1985, and remains both his biggest-selling single and the one critics most often use as a dividing line. His Grammy total stands at 25, the most won by any solo male artist. He received the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize in 2009 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014.

Studio output slowed to near-silence. He now records through his own imprint, So What the Fuss Records, distributed by Republic, and has released occasional singles rather than albums — among them "Can We Fix Our Nation's Broken Heart", issued in August 2024 and aimed squarely at the American election campaign. The topical-single habit has proved more durable than the album habit.

Where things stand in 2026

Wonder told Annie Mac on the BBC's Sidetracked podcast that he is working again, framing it in terms of obligation rather than appetite: for as long as you breathe, he said, there is more to do, and he has no intention of stopping what keeps coming through him. On 23 July 2026 that turned into an announcement — a record titled Through the Eyes of Wonder, reported as his first full-length project in 22 years, which he described as being finished off with four newly written tracks. No release date has been confirmed.

Before that comes the archive. On 28 September 2026, at 4.54 in the morning, he released Songs in the Key of Life — The EP, four previously unheard recordings from the 1976 sessions: "It's Easier", "My Life Story of Love", "I Can See the Sun In Late December" and "I'm Into Livin'". The timing is an in-joke — bassist Nathan Watts is said to have called out the hour when the final session of the original album wrapped at 4.54am. Wonder curated the selection himself; John Fischbach and Gary O Adante, who engineered and mixed the 1976 record, handled the new mixes. Gregory Phillinganes and Michael Sembello play on it, and the backing vocals on "I'm Into Livin'" include Thelma Houston and Deniece Williams.

Wonder also used the 2025 UK dates to deal with something that has followed him around the internet for years. At the Cardiff show on 9 July he addressed the conspiracy theory that he can see, explaining that he lost his sight shortly after birth and arguing that it had allowed him to judge people by what they are rather than what they look like.

The 50th-anniversary tour

The run was announced on 8 September 2026: eighteen shows under the name Songs in the Key of Life Performances, promoted by Live Nation and produced by Wonder Productions, with the 1976 album played in full at every date. It is his first official tour since 2024.

It opens at the Utilita Arena in Birmingham on 13 October 2026, then runs through Paris (Accor Arena, 15 October), Copenhagen (Royal Arena, 18th), Oslo (Unity Arena, 20th), Stockholm (3Arena, 22nd), Hannover (ZAG-Arena, 24th), Cologne (Lanxess Arena, 26th) and Amsterdam (Ziggo Dome, 28th). November brings Dublin's 3Arena on the 1st, The O2 in London on the 3rd — with a second London night added on the 5th after the first sold through — Co-op Live in Manchester on the 8th and the OVO Hydro in Glasgow on the 11th.

The American leg starts at Madison Square Garden on 19 November, then the United Center in Chicago on the 21st and Capital One Arena in Washington on the 23rd. Two nights at the Fox Theatre in Detroit on 8 and 9 December return the album to the city that made it, before the tour closes at the Intuit Dome in Los Angeles on 19 December. Tickets went on general sale on 10 September in North America and 11 September in Europe and the UK, with the Detroit pair held back to the 15th.

This is the second time he has toured the album whole. The 2014–15 Songs in the Key of Life Performances ran to 44 North American shows across three legs and took $41.7m at the box office, splitting the record either side of an interval — twelve songs before, ten after.

On stage

The 2025 Love, Light and Song dates — Lytham on 3 July, Co-op Live Manchester on the 5th, Birmingham on the 7th, Cardiff on the 9th and a closing headline set at BST Hyde Park on 12 July — are the best available guide to his current form. They ran to around two and a half hours and averaged 27 songs with no encore, opening with "Love's in Need of Love Today" and a harmonica-led reading of "Imagine" before "Master Blaster (Jammin')" and "Higher Ground".

Reviewers at Hyde Park were unambiguous about the voice, singling out "Lately" and "Overjoyed" as the test cases and reporting that he passed them at 75. The showmanship is still built on crowd handling rather than production: he split the men and women in the audience into separate parts on "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours" and kept moving his own phrasing against them. Corinne Bailey Rae came out for a Sly and the Family Stone cover.

The 2026 shows are a different proposition — a fixed, sequenced 21-song record played start to finish, with whatever he chooses to add around it, rather than a hits set he can reshape nightly. No support acts have been announced for any date.